hexies – My Making Life

Flower Garden Ramble

Feb 16, 2019 missleela83

To echo the words of Claude Monet “I must have flowers, always, and always.” Having fresh flowers in our home brings me so much joy. They instantly lift a room with their sweet scent and colourful petals. They nod happily at me every morning, greeting me with their showy smiles.

Monet was an avid garden enthusiast and his garden and home in Giverny is on my bucket list of places to visit. I too love gardening, although I am still trying to find my way and un-earth my own garden. I love watching gardening shows, especially anything by Monty Don who just happens to be my gardening idol. This year I would like to visit more gardens. I want to take leisurely strolls through the plants and flowers, marvelling at the wonders of nature.

Garden Path at Giverny – Claude Monet. I can picture myself strolling down this path, taking in the sweet scents and colour parade.

Madame Monet and Child – Claude Monet. Yes, I can think of nothing more pleasant than sitting amongst the flowers and doing some stitching!

Just as I love and must always have real flowers, I also cannot be without the English Paper Piecing kind of flower, the always iconic, hexagon flower. When I received a bundle of Liberty fabrics from Westwood Acres for their Monthly Liberty Club last year, the package was full of so many pretty florals I knew instantly that I had to create something with hexagon flowers.

I wanted to create a miniature quilt inspired by strolling through a flower garden. I used nine of the liberty floral prints to make the flower petals and three different solid liberty fabrics for the flower centres. I played around a lot with the placement of the flowers before finally settling on the final design.

I decided I wanted to connect the flowers a bit differently. I wanted the flowers to stand out as individual blooms and not to have their petals touching each other. I used diamonds and hexagons in soft green cotton fabric to separate the flowers. These green shapes both represent the leaves of the flowers, but also the crisscrossing pathway through them.

I decided to hand quilt, using coloured embroidery floss that picked out a colour from the flower fabrics. I hand quilted around each flower petal, as well as the cross seams of the hexagon diamond motifs between each flower. Lastly, I had quilted around the entire outer edge of the pieced quilt section.

I used a soft buttery yellow fabric for the border and binding to represent the sunshine that twinkles through the leaves and trees down to the garden below.

I really love my finished hexie flower garden. It feels happy and calm, and whilst it’s no Monet painting, for me it brings the beauty of flowers and gardens into my craft studio where it hangs.

Quilt Stats

Paper Pieces Used – ¾” Hexagons, ¾” 60 degree diamonds, ¾” half hexagons, ¾” triangle (diamond cut in half)

Total number of pieces = 123

Paper Pieced finished size = 11.25” x 11.5 “

Border Size = 1”

Finished Quilt Size = 14” x 14.25”

Hours to prep & piece shapes = 18

Hours for hand pieced borders = 6.5

Hours to Quilt = 13

Hours for binding = 1.5

Total hours = 39

Here are some detail photos:

Hand quilting.

Border and binding.

Binding and back.

Hanging sleeve and ribbon hangers.

Happy stitching lovely makers!

Miss Leela x

making

A Special Dolls Quilt

Jan 12, 2019Jan 12, 2019 missleela83

Last year a lovely friend commissioned me to make a dolls quilt for her little girl for Christmas. She had been inspired by my large scrappy hexagon quilt and was after a scaled down version. Naturally, I was happy to do this.

My friend had made a patchwork quilt for her daughter and so I asked if she had any fabric left over from that quilt and I would incorporate the prints into the dolls quilt as well. Knowing my friend was a lover of Liberty fabric, I also included some special floral prints as well as some other fabrics from my stash. I also pulled some fabric from the stash of scraps my friend had given me from her children’s clothing business Ecolier Kids.

I decide to use ¾” hexagons. This is a nice versatile size, the perfect scale for a quilt to go on a dolls bed, which measured 41 x 26cm. After I had pieced the hexagons to a size that would allow the quilt to hang slightly over the sides of the bed, it was time to quilt.

I chose simple quilting in straight lines vertically down the quilt that dissected the hexagons in half. I chose fabric from my stash for the backing in a lovely soft pastel brocade floral design.

For the binding, I also raided my stash to find a plain soft creamy yellow that went nicely with the backing fabric and didn’t overpower the quilt front.

Of course, I decided that you couldn’t have a dolls quilt without a pillow as well, so I made a ¾” hexagon flower using lovely liberty fabrics and appliqued it to a square of the same binding fabric. I made a two piece overhanging slip back from the quilt backing fabric. I then made a stuffed pillow that was sewn up all four sides to slip into the pillowcase.

My friend loved the finished quilt and the extra pillow. More importantly, her daughter loved it and has been busy putting her dolls to bed with their new quilt and pillow.

It is such a wonderful thing to create something so special and to know that it will be treasured for many years to come. I think it is a very true statement when someone explains that an item was stitched with love. I like to add that something was stitched with joy as well. Sewing gives me great pleasure and enjoyment, but the act of sewing something for someone else and seeing the joy on their face when they receive, well that’s one of life’s most beautiful and simple and pleasures of all.

Happy Stitching Friends!

Miss Leela x

making

Flower Power Mini Quilt

Sep 28, 2018Sep 28, 2018 missleela83

Sometime after finishing my first Miniature Quilt ‘Garden of Patience’ I started what would turn out to be a long term quarter inch hexie project. I decided that I wanted to make a giant hexagon flower. Each petal would be a different colour of the rainbow and would be pieced from quarter inch hexies. Now I didn’t record the date I started this insane idea, but I’m taking a guess that it was approximately seven or so years ago.

Flower-Power-Mini-Quilt---Miss-Leela-27 — Piecing the petals.

This year I decided that I was going to finish all of my English Paper Piecing WIP’s because I have quite a few of them! I had a rummage through my WIP basket and came across a couple of finished and half-finished petals for my hexagon flower quilt. Straight away I knew this was one that I had to get finished. Over the next few months I pieced together the individual petals, finishing the ones I had already started and starting the colours I hadn’t yet begun. At last I had all seven petals pieced.

Flower-Power-Mini-Quilt---Miss-Leela-26 — Piecing the petals to the center

The project gained steam now as I could start to see it coming together. The petals pieced I began to sew them together, first attaching each petal to the centre white pieced hexagon, and then piecing the sides between each petal. That done I needed to decide how I was going to finish off the flower. Did I want to leave it as just the centre and petals? Did I want to square it off and add in a multi-coloured arrangement of quarter inch hexie flowers with borders? I spent a bit of time weighing up my options before settling on adding diamond shaped blocks pieced from more quarter inch hexies in white and cream fabrics. This allowed me to create one giant pieced hexagon shape with six straight edges.

Flower-Power-Mini-Quilt---Miss-Leela-25 — Petals are all pieced to the center, time to piece the petal sides together

Flower-Power-Mini-Quilt---Miss-Leela-30 — Piecing on the diamond corner blocks

The piecing complete, it was time to attach it to backing fabric. I did some stash diving and settled on a neutral pale cream cotton fabric. I used a large square of visafix to adhere the piecing to the backing. I then also did some thread basting along the sides to help keep the work in place and to try and avoid distorting the backing fabric while I hand appliqued around the six sides of the piecing on to the backing.

Flower-Power-Mini-Quilt---Miss-Leela-15 — Appliquing on to the backing fabric

The applique complete I then had to decide how to quilt it. I knew I didn’t want to do any kind of visible quilting over the top of the pieced quarter inch hexies as I thought it would detract from the overall look and design. I didn’t want all of my painstakingly pieced hexies to be hidden under quilting stitches! In the end I decided to hand quilt very tiny stitches along the sides of each petal. I’m going to try and explain this as best I can. I would do a very small stitch in the corner of an individual quarter inch hexie piece, then bring my needle up in the next corner of the hexie piece. I would continue in this manner along the edges of each petal joint. What it created was virtually invisible stitches on the front and larger stitches on the back. It has had the desired affect though. The piece is not interrupted by quilt stitches, but it has done the job in connecting the front of the quilt through the wadding to the back of the quilt.

Flower-Power-Mini-Quilt---Miss-Leela-28 — Sewing tiny quilting stitches

Flower-Power-Mini-Quilt---Miss-Leela-29 — Quilting along the edge

I then decided to hand quilt small visible quilt stitches following the outline of the whole pieced hexagon. That done the whole project sat for two months waiting for me to come back and finish it off properly. I had left a border of the backing fabric so I needed to decide how I was going to quilt that. I decided to machine quilt it and drew three lines of quilting following the hexagon sides and radiating out. The first quilt line measure a quarter inch out from the piecing, the next line measure half an inch from the first quilting line, and the third measures three quarter inch from the second quilting line. This has then left me with about a half inch of border fabric before the binding which measures quarter inch. I was pretty pleased with how that symmetry worked out.

The binding is hand sewn on to the back. I stash dived for both the backing and binding fabrics. I trialled a couple of different binding fabrics before settling on the neutral taupe colour.

Flower-Power-Mini-Quilt---Miss-Leela-22 — The back

Flower-Power-Mini-Quilt---Miss-Leela-23 — Hanging sleeve for rod and ribbon loops to hang on wall hooks

And just like that my ‘Flower Power Mini Quilt’ is finished. I love it! It brings such a happy burst of loveliness to my studio wall. It feels great to finally get this piece finished. It’s really quite satisfying to see all the time and effort that goes into something for it to then bloom in front of your very eyes.

Without further ado, here are the quilt Stats:

Finished Quilt Size: Each hexagon side = 11.5” Width = 23” x Height = 20”

Finished Pieced Size: Each hexagon side = 8.5” Width = 17.5” x Height = 15.25”

Binding Size: ¼”

Hexagon piece size = 1/$”

Hexagon Centre and Petal individual hexie count = 127

Total Count (7 Petal Blocks) = 889

Diamond individual hexie count = 42

Total Count (6 diamond blocks) = 252

Grand Total Quarter Inch Hexie Count = 1,141

Time

Hexie Prep = 7.5hrs (cutting out and basting the hexie pieces) (that’s pretty conservative really, probably a lot more time than that!)

Hexie Flower Piecing: Individual Petal = 15hrs Total for 7 petals = 105hrs

Piecing Petals together = 8.5hrs

Piecing the diamond borders on = 24.5hrs

Applique = 4.5hrs

Quilting = 4hrs

Finishing and Binding = 4hrs

Grand Total time to make = 158hrs

Flower-Power-Mini-Quilt---Miss-Leela-18 — What the back of all that piecing looks like!

This slideshow requires JavaScript.

making

Half Hexagon Sample Mini Quilt

Jun 15, 2018Jun 15, 2018 missleela83

This year I have decided to extend the range and sizes of paper pieces I sell in my shop for use in English Paper Piecing. I also decided it would be a great idea to make sample quilts using all the shapes I stock in all of their various sizes. The idea sounded great in theory until I realised how many sample quilts or hoop wall hangings I’d have to make! I still think it’s a good idea though, especially as next year I hope to take my little market stall to some of the local quilt shows and craft trade shows. I have a picture in my head of how my stall will look and it includes a back drop of mini quilts and hoops.

One of the new shapes I’ll be adding to my range of papers are Half Hexagons. This is a shape I myself had not yet sewn with. Being a new shape to my shop I decided this would be the perfect place to start with a sample quilt. I had a look on Pinterest for some ideas and settled on creating hexagon blocks using two colours of half hexagons. The completed design almost has a chain like look.

I raided my stash for some soft pink, blue and purple fabrics. I settled on 14 different prints & paired them up. I used half inch size half hexies (where the half inch is measured along the 3 short sides).

After completing my hexagon blocks I then played around with their placement until I was happy with the final composition before then sewing them all together.

To straighten up the sides I had to add 3 half hexagon blocks to the two long sides and a few extra half hexagon pieces to the top and bottom edges. Once I had pieced it all together I cut and basted the border fabric to large rectangle card and using small paperclips to hold in place, hand sewed the borders on. When it came to piecing the top and bottom border on I folded the extra half hexies I added to get a straight edge.

I wasn’t sure if I would need to quilt this piece, so I worked a little backwards when it came to finishing the quilt off. I picked a pretty floral fabric from my stash for the backing and used a light weight batting in-between. I chose a neutral fawn coloured cotton fabric for the binding and decided to add a little peeper border in pink, something else I tried out for the first time. I had a bit of trouble hand sewing the binding on around the corners due to the extra bulk of the peeper border, so I’m not entirely happy with that.

Once I had the quilt bound I decided I did need to do some quilting. I chose to hand quilt vertical lines running down the seams. I decided to just do every second vertical seam line, but then I made a boo boo and quilted down the wrong seam. There was no way I was going to attempt un-picking it so I decided to just quilt down each vertical seam. I think the finished effect looks really good. Because I wanted the quilting stitches to disappear on the front, rather than using quilting cotton I used the same thread when hand piecing the shapes together, Superior Threads Bottom Line in white. This worked perfectly as the stitches on the front have literally ‘sunk’ in to the pieced seams.

I’m really pleased with how this mini quilt has turned out. It was a pleasure to sew and it was nice experimenting with a new shape and pattern.

Here are the final stats:

Finished Quilt Size: 9.5” x 12.5”

Pieced Half Hexagon section finished size: 7” x 9.75”

Number of ‘hexagon’ blocks: 21

Number of individual half hexagons: 208

Hours to make: 33.5

Happy Stitching,

Miss Leela x

making

May Reflections

Jun 10, 2018Aug 30, 2018 missleela83

Hello Maker Friends! I hope this post finds you well? I’m back to share some reflections on my making life for May. It was a rather busy with lots of little & big things happening. The end of the month saw illness descend on our little family. First Tilly contracted conjunctivitis, which we are still trying to get rid of after nearly 3 weeks. Then I caught a cold, which I have since passed on to both Tilly & my Hubby. I am still not back to 100% & I am now battling the last stage, an annoying throat tickle & cough. Last time it took about 2-3 weeks for me to shift Mr Most Annoying Cough in the Whole Wide World! Hopefully that won’t be the case this time.

On a much happier note we celebrated Tilly’s 2^nd Birthday this month. I still can’t believe I have a two-year-old. My little baby has disappeared. We had a small party with just Tilly’s Grandparent’s, her Aunt, Uncle & Cousins. We had a beautiful day playing with the twenty or so balloons I had blown up the night before to fill our living room floor. Tilly was so excited to see them when she got up she didn’t even notice the pile of presents on her little table. We had a BBQ lunch & enjoyed birthday cake. I made a Strawberry Shortcake – vanilla mud cake with jam filling & white chocolate buttercream frosting, covered in fresh strawberries & shortbread crumbs. It was delicious. One of Tilly’s presents was a trampoline which she absolutely loved. She must have bounced around in it for about an hour.

Among Tilly’s bought presents I also made her an amigurumi lamb. Not the funnest amigurumi toy I’ve made, I was well & truly over the bobble stitch when I finished it! I was also holding two yarns for the bobble stitch body & cap, a fake mohair with an 8ply acrylic, so that didn’t make it any easier. Still the finished effect is very lovely & fluffy which is what I was after. Tilly loves it. I used a pattern by Anatillea. I actually found the instructions for the bobble stitch a bit hard to understand & ended up using a tutorial by Sandra of The Cherry Heart to make the stitch instead. The pattern also calls you to crochet the body & head as one piece, but I elected not to do this & instead made them as two separate pieces & stitched them together as I normally would. Apart from those two things the pattern was very good.

Another gift make I finished was the crochet baby blanket I was making for my best friend’s new baby boy. I crocheted a ripple blanket out of Patons Big Baby 4 ply in colours 3911 (variegated) & 2582 (mint green)using Lucy of Attic 24 tutorial. I didn’t have the blanket done in time for when bub arrived, I actually just met him for the first time last weekend. I was pleased with how the blanket turned out, my bestie loved it also. I just wish I was a bit quicker at making crochet blankets. I’ve only been crocheting for the last 2-3 years & I find I’m still quite slow. Plus the yarn was quite splitty which didn’t help my pace much!

I’ve started work on another baby crochet blanket, this one is much smaller though. It’s for Tilly’s baby doll that we got her for her birthday. I started out experimenting with some treble & double crochet rows, working them in to the back & front loops, but this was a bit tedious I felt to do for the whole blanket, so I’ve reverted back to just treble rows. I also stuffed up a couple of times at the start of the rows so it’s not quite straight…I don’t think the doll will mind though!

I did a bit of work on one of my #makenine2018 projects for Tilly – the Granny Square Cardigan. I was thinking of using the blocks to make a poncho, but I’m thinking now I may just stick to the pattern & make it into the cardigan. I have been enjoying crocheting the blocks, they are quite quick to whip up & I make 3 to 4 at night. I think I need to strat weaving my ends in as I go though!

I went on a little adventure to the Autumn in Orange Fibre Muster with my Mumsie & a fibre friend at the start of the month. We had a wonderful time squishing lots of lovely yarns & rovings. I came home with quite a few goodies, some yarn, dyes & a hand turned drop spindle. We thoroughly enjoyed ourselves & I loved being amongst so many fibre enthusiasts. The hall was pumping & the atmosphere was warm & friendly. As a thank you for driving us out there my Mumsie bought me a pottery mug with a little sheep on it. So stinking cute! Once we had finished, we headed back to Bathurst & had lunch at a charming Greek Restaurant with an awesome retro 50’s decor that had seen it’s last refurbishment done in the 80’s. So cool.

I have been steadily working on my re-branding…yes still. A complete overall of my entire business takes time! I have been re-thinking what items I want to focus on making with moving forward with Miss Leela Handmade. I have decided I will be launching a completely new brand/shop where I will sell my EPP supplies, as well as EPP kits & patterns, possibly fabric & hand dyed yarn. Miss Leela Handmade with then just be home to any items I actually make to sell, such as quilts & wall hangings etc. I have some ideas for pin cushions, needle keepers as well as project & notion bags.

As you will have seen in my previous post I received my copy of Flossie Teacake’s Guide to English Paper Piecing by Florence Knapp. I was so excited to be apart of this wonderful book. I have also been working on another editorial piece behind the scenes this month…all will hopefully be revealed sometime this month.

I have been working on two EPP mini quilts this month. The first is my Half Hexie Mini Quilt (which at the time of writing I have just about finished) & a Granny Flower Mini Quilt made with quarter inch hexies. I will do a more detailed post about my Half Hexie Mini Quilt, but I have enjoyed working on it immensely & love how it has turned out. The Granny Flower project is one I started a while ago. I have finished sewing the flowers together, but I’m now stuck on how I want to finish it. I’m not sure if I should leave it as is or add some different design elements or borders.

I celebrated my second Mother’s Day Weekend. On the Saturday Mumsie & I went to our local Brown Owls meet up for some making & chit chat. We then met up with my Dad & Tilly for lunch. Does anyone have any tips on how to keep a two-year-old quiet & sitting peacefully when dining in a public place?! She isn’t too bad, but sometimes her behaviour just turns me off going out anywhere in public with her! She now pretty much refuses to sit in a high chair so usually that means sitting in my lap which makes it very awkward to enjoy eating any kind of food. Usually the only way to keep her quiet is by watching cartoons on my phone. I hate the amount of screen time she’s having, but honestly sometimes it’s the only way to keep me from losing my mind! On Sunday I stayed home & had a lovely quiet day playing with Tilly & doing some sewing.

So that was May. I can’t believe it’s now Winter & we are nearly half way through the year. I’m not sure about you but I feel I am very behind in achieving all the goals I set for myself this year. I think the second half of the year is going to be extremely busy if I want to get all the things done I wanted to!

Happy Making Lovelies,

Miss Leela x