Recently I had to clean up the dining room, which also happens to be my work area for my Glorious Hexagons work. We had company for a week and we needed a place to eat meals.

That left me with no place to cut fabric and no place to glue baste my pieces. I had everything pushed to the side and I thought I was going to get by for a week without stitching, but I failed to realize how strong the urge would be to take up needle and thread.

It seemed that the least messy way to satisfy my urge would be to assemble some of my three inch assembled Glorious Hexagon blocks into a larger hexagon unit. I was only going to make one of these blocks, but after making one I realized that I would assemble the entire quilt using these large blocks. They would provide me with an intermediate step between small block assembly and final quilt construction. They would provide me with a means to insert the colored star units with minimal fuss. They would also save me from having to fiddle with nearly 300 small blocks when it came time to sew the quilt top together. It seemed like a no brainer for me. So I just kept on sewing those large hexagons until I had quite a few. Currently there are eleven finished, one in the works, and four more big block units portioned out into plastic bags ready to assemble.

I will be showing the first five blocks in this post..

I came up with the idea of putting together hexagons and triangles in the same configuration as the block named Willa from The New Hexagon book. All of the blocks will use Kona Chocolate for the outer triangles. The inner triangles will change color from block to block. For this block I pieced the inner triangles from very small scraps of a yellow patterned fabric that is a part of the Embracing Horses collection. Each triangle is made up of four smaller triangles which are joined randomly. The outer hexagons are all primarily rust colored and composed of pieces cut from multiple fabrics in the Embracing Horses collection. Looking at the top edge of the central hexagon you can see that the yellow of the triangles melds nicely with the yellow of the hexagon above the bird.

This block uses the mottled green section of the Panel Fabric for the central triangles. All of the hexagons are composed of pieces cut exclusively from the Panel Fabric. These hexagons are very mechanical in feel. There are no horsey parts to be found.

The inner triangles of this block are cut from Kona Tera Cotta fabric. It is a bit on the bright side but I thought that it worked well with the surrounding hexagons. All of the hexagons are composed of pieces cut exclusively from the Panel Fabric with the one exception of the horse heads along the outer edge of the central hexagon. This piece has an emphasis on horse eyes. They appear in the central hexagon as well as three of the outer hexagons. The outer hexagons with horse eyes are alternated with hexagons that make use of the mane fabric. The upper left hexagon is a block named Katja. I like the way that Katja looks, but she is a bitch to assemble. She also presents difficulties when piecing her to other units because of the three points that come together at the end of each edge of the block. The outer blocks were alternated with horsey eye blocks followed by mechanical mane blocks. Even though they are basically the same color and value they do have a different feel to them.

The central triangles of this block are cut from Kona Ash fabric. For the first time I tried a bit of a different configuration for the outer hexagons in terms of color placement. I alternated hexagons that were primarily blue in color with hexagons that were primarily rust in color. I have since repeated this alternation concept a number of times with other large hexagons. This placement of blocks gives a bit of a dimensional look to the larger block that resembles plane propellors.

The central triangles of this block are cut from Kona Butterscotch fabric. I continued with the concept of alternating the outer hexagons. In this case I chose three highly detailed blocks that had some lighter elements in them. I chose to alternate those blocks with three blocks that were primarily heavier and darker in value. The darker blocks appear to fall back in space and the lighter blocks appear to come forward a bit.

My next post will feature the next five large hexagons.