After laboring most of the year on Millefiori hand pieced (not EPP) patchwork, I was desperate to do something quick and easy. I have some jelly rolls in my stash and decided to use the one that I already dug into, namely cat themed 2.5″ strips collection with five different designs in yellow, red, white and aquamarine/blue. From this set I’ve used a couple of yellow strips for Millefiori quilt, and a “thermos” case for a French press, and also an aquamarine purrr-meow strip was turned into a hair scrunchy. I wanted to do hexagons, so I played in Photoshop with the photos of the fabric, combining them and turning them into equilateral triangles as pairs. There’s a wide variety of hexagon blocks that can be created with this strategy. Unfortunately, my Photoshop file with the final design didn’t get saved, thanks to Windows deciding to update itself despite the schedule that I’ve set (grrrrr!) Either way, the final patchwork turned out a bit different, because I had the leftover triangles that I made hexagon blocks with for the last three rows, as opposed to creating block designs I had in my PSD file. In other words, since each jelly roll strip (2.5″ x 44″) will yield 7 pairs of triangles, which will make up two hexagons and one diamond, this left me with two extra hexagons, after using 7 diamonds in each row of hexagons.
For this project, I 3D printed my own triangle template (download it here) instead of using quilting rulers. This template has quarter inch seam allowance and the inner triangle is exactly 4″ tall, with the tip of the other triangle being trimmed to a .25″ seam allowance.
This seemed to work really well, and I didn’t have issues getting the seams to line up. Equilateral triangles are quite easy to work with, because when sewing them together they line up exactly on top of previously added triangle, so there’s no issue with getting alignment right. The patchwork was sown by creating strips of triangles and then stitching these strips together.
The quilting was done in straight lines, which means I had to rotate the whole quilt around the needle. By doing this, the bulk of the quilt would at some point end up under the machine, and under it’s heated light bulb, which resulted in a burn mark on the backing fabric. So, to prevent this from happening again, I now use a dual LED light (sold as grow light, but it’s too weak for that purpose) and clip it to the lamp nearby and adjust the flexible base, or stem of the two lights to have it illuminate the front and back of the machine, which works well enough.
My initial idea was to make similar triangle based patchwork as the back side for this quilt, but after I finished this second patchwork, I decided to make two quilts instead, so that each of my kids gets one. At this point, I still have to make a quilt sandwich with the second patchwork and do the quilting/binding, so I’ll show that in another post later. For now, here’s the picture of the finished quilt:
And a work-in-progress photo of adding a binding strip:
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