My First Hexie Flower and Getting Closer to Finishing the Bird Panels

Dave and I are off on a new adventure. Last week he got confirmation that a contract he’d been hired for in Petawawa, ON was a go. Sunday morning, we packed up and headed east and then north. We were driving along Hwy 41 N, when Dave pulled over quickly so I followed suit. At first, I thought something was wrong but when he got out of the rental truck (provided by the company) and started walking back to the car with a big smile on his face, I knew what was up. This was a scenario that had repeated itself several times on our cross country treks last winter.

He retrieved the camera from the back seat of the car and took this photo.

Even with the sky overcast, you can see the spectacular yellows, oranges and red of the fall leaves.

We’re going to be here anywhere from two to four weeks, so I brought along some hand sewing projects to work on during the day while Dave’s at work. For a long time, I’ve been admiring the hexie flowers that Maria over at Life on the Block posts each Wednesday. The majority of her flower hexies have the petals fussy cut out of the cutest novelty fabrics. When she finally sews them all together she is going to have a really cool I-spy quilt.

So when I saw these little hexie kits at Sew Sisters Quilt Shop earlier in the month, I picked up a couple to give English paper piecing a try.

As I mentioned back in this post, Sew Sisters has a bunch of these little kits to choose from in either 30s reproduction fabrics or brights. They also have a great hexie tutorial on their blog… but I didn’t have the special glue stick they used so I hand basted the fabric around the paper hexies following other tutorials I found on the net. I worked on this first kit an hour or two each for the last three days and this morning I hand stitched the last seam.

I’m sure that with practice I’ll get faster at basting and sewing them together.  This is definitely not a quick sew project but rather something to be worked on a bit at a time. I can see why people take them with them for times when they have to sit and wait for something… for example at the doctor’s office or when waiting for children to finish after school activities. They’d also be great to take along on a long road trip if you’re the passenger much of the time.

I’ve got one more of these little kits to sew up. By that time, I should have decided if making hexie flowers is something I want to continue doing or if I can just happily checked them off my list of “I want to try that someday.”

If I do continue, I’m going to be following Maria’s example and fussy cutting the fabrics. The hexie flower above would be so much prettier if that fabric in the second row of petals had been fussy cut.

(Please note:  I’m not suggesting that the kits should have been fussy cut as I know that would be way too time consuming for a quilt shop. Just stating what I’ll be doing if I catch the hexie flower bug.)

I’ve also made quite a bit more progress embellishing the bird panels. All the embroidery is finished on the orange and green bird panel.

And the first flower on the blue bird panel is about ¾ complete.

Once I get these done, I’m going to work on sewing some more coin purses for the upcoming UR Priceless Coin Purse blog hop. I brought along our oldest daughter’s portable Singer sewing machine that she had in storage. I just need to figure out somewhere to set it up.

My day of the blog hop is November 6^th.

I’ve completed one purse using the pattern provided to all participants. I only had the one rectangular frame, but it feels good to have that finished way ahead of time. I still need to sew the half circle frame onto another purse. The pattern for that one needs a bit of tweaking before it’s ready to share. So I’ll be making a couple or three more of those to get that pattern perfected.

What are you working on this week?

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