The Paris hexagon quilt is finally finished, label attached, and ready to send off to an exhibit. As usual, I learned some new lessons making this quilt, here are a few of them off the top of my head.
1) I wish I had taken the time to make paper-piecing patterns for the blocks. I hate paper-piecing, so I did them with the traditional method of adding strips around the center. After all the blocks were finished, I made a template so I could mark the stitching lines, and the “logs” are quite uneven. I would have had a more accurate finished block with the paper-piecing.
2) I tried to use free-motion quilting to quilt around the hexagons, but it did not work well (my lines were pretty wobbly). I ended up straight-stitching around each hexagon twice, which required pushing and pulling the quilt through the machine many, many times. Just remembering makes my shoulders hurt. The stitching in the white “paths” was not so bad, since I could quilt along rows.
3. Argh, the binding! The stripe I used for the borders had only an 1/8″ seam allowance, and when I trimmed the quilt to put the binding on, I forgot and trimmed at the edge. Oops! Being a judge, I know the batting should come to the edge of the binding, but it doesn’t. I did machine stitch the binding to the back of the quilt so that I could be sure to follow the pattern of the stripe, but it would have been easier to hand-stitch the front if I’d given myself a little more room, in other words, if I hadn’t stitched right on the edge of the pattern.
4. I forgot to add the sleeve when I stitched on the binding, so I had to hand-stitch both edges. : (
5. I was worried about using the yellow stripe for the border, even though it was part of the fabric I used for the white paths. It turned out to be a great choice, added a needed spark.
Here is a photo of the finished quilt - I described in earlier blogs how I turned photos into toile fabric, and how I constructed the blocks.
Photo of finished quilt
I am calling the quilt Millefleur, suggested by a quilting friend.