The blue in the title of this blog post refers to the mottled blue fabric in the Embracing Horses collection that I have used as the center of a few of my Large Hexagons such as this one.

And this one.

While I was at a recent quilt retreat in Lancaster I decided that it was my desire to create a quilt using nothing but Large Hexagons with blue central stars. In order to achieve that goal I attempted to purchase five yards of the mottled blue fabric. I had found some online and was very happy to obtain it. Unfortunately the database of the website was not correct, and the site had only one yard to send me.

In the meantime, however, I had cut up what little I had left of my mottled blue fabric and combined the pieces into eleven small hexagons.

After I discovered I would not be receiving a sufficient amount of mottled blue fabric to achieve my dream of a quilt with nothing but blue stars I thought that I was going to have to give up on the idea.  It was then that I came upon an untouched layer stack of blue mane fabric from the collection. The photo below shows the mane fabric above the mottled blue fabric.

I did not regard the mane fabric as a particularly good choice for creating hexagons, and it had consequently been neglected. It was the right color, and I really needed a solution to the problem of being unable to obtain more of the mottled fabric, so I decided to come up with a way to make it work. I decided that the way to get the most out of this fabric was to keep the pieces as large as possible and let the curves of the design do their work. The way to do that was to use a three inch diamond shape and to forgo the creation of a central hexagon altogether. I would go straight for a star shape instead using six diamonds to create that shape.

The resulting star made optimal use of the linear quality of the mane fabric. It was the linear quality of the fabric that had made it unsuited to the creation of hexagons from small pieces in my opinion. Yet that same quality made it uniquely suited to the creation of stars when used on a large scale.

There was one negative to the use of the star shape. This method of construction resulted in the need for inset seams. The following four photos illustrate the construction process.

I start by sewing three of the small hexagons to the central star using inset seams. The small hexagons are placed equally distant from each other leaving three blank spaces also equally distant from each other.

Once the first three small hexagons are in place the remaining three hexagons have triangles added to them creating diamond shapes to be sewn into the remaining three areas. These diamonds are added with inset seams.

In the photo above you can see that the first diamond shape is being added to the Large Hexagon.

Here is the completed large hexagon shown in the process photos above.

Following are some more of the Large Hexagons I have made with blue mane fabric in the center. Notice how the movement in each star is different depending on the cut of the fabric used.

I estimate that I have enough of the mane fabric to create at least six more central stars.