Strangely addictive hexagons

After several years of stashing away sumptuous fabrics and saying I'd do something with them, I have finally made my first foray into patchwork.

I was lucky enough to secure a place on one of Coats Crafts' patchwork workshops at the Sewing for Pleasure show earlier this year, where I learnt a nifty little technique for hand sewing hexagons.

Brilliant for lazy (and less than perfect) sewers like me, it involved using little binder clips to secure your fabric as it was folded over a hexagon-shaped paper template. Each corner was then secured with a couple of stitches, unclipping as you went, with the thread run straight across the back. No pinning, no tacking and you can easily slip the paper template out again to reuse it.

So I came home and got myself a little bit addicted to hexagons...

Here I am preparing my materials - some gorgeous Amy Butler fabric and some do-it-yourself hexagons. For the templates, I searched for 'hexagon template' in Google's image search and found a handy one on Homespun Scrapbooking. Having settled on a 2.5cm diameter, I replicated this several times in Microsoft Word and made a useful print-out.

It's all in the preparation

Then it was on to cutting out all the hexagons. I settled on 15 of each colour - that's 75 lovingly hand sewn hexagons all together. Although I confess, I inevitably became less meticulous as I went on, and eventually settled for chopping the fabric into strips rather than carefully cutting round each template. It didn't seem to make a lot of difference to the final look.

Next steps - the fun bit: preparing the design. I laid out all my cut-up hexagons and put the fabric back together in a lovely new order. You can see my final design below - big enough to make a nice lap quilt.

I'll have a 'P' please Bob.

Right now, I'm still sewing the hexagons together - with very small and neat over-sewing on each of the sides where they meet. The repetition is incredibly therapeutic and there is something very pleasing about the tessellation of the hexagonal shape.

And for all you children of the eighties out there, I'm calling this my 'Blockbusters' quilt. All together now, der - der - di  - der - der, der - di - der ...