The Quilt Engineer

Hexagons are perfect in so many ways.

One of the reasons they are so perfect for quilts is because they are the only other regular polygon, besides for squares and regular triangles, that will tessellate. I hope I didn’t lose everyone in that last statement. In plain English this means that you can piece together regular hexagons over and over again covering a space without any gaps or overlaps. (If ANYONE is curious, the word “regular ” in terms of polygons means that all the sides are the same length and it also has the same angles all around). As a result there are many wonderful hexagon patterns for quilts. And, of course we have the old craze becoming new again of paper pieced hexagons.

So, I started thinking about how I would do hexagons. I also wanted to complete a quilt in my Measured Improv. series that wasn’t so much an artistic quilt like The Big Log or Up In The Air but, a more fun, creative, crafty one. Of course it still had to utilize the method of Measured Improv. Somewhere along the way I thought, how about improvisationally pieced Hexagons! Wallah!

So, I came up with this pattern. It was a lot of fun to put together. I’ll be posting a tutorial of this one soon! It’s fairly simple and painless with very little measuring.

There are 9 “Wonky” Hexagons each has a blue center. There are three other colors in each block that are arranged in alternating arrangements: reds, oranges, and greens/turquoises.  There are fabrics from quite a few different lines in this quilt, I wont try to name them all. Two lines that stand out and appear more than once are Love by Amy Butler and Modern Meadow by Joel Dewberry. The background is Kona White. I thought about using Snow or something a little more mellow but, I love how crisp this quilt looks with the bright Kona White. The hexagons are pieced improv style with very little measuring which makes them fun and very organic. I love that they are not perfect “regular” hexagons but, each one has it’s own personality.

I love the binding for this quilt. It is from the Joel Dewberry’s line Modern Meadow. To me it looks like stripes and zig zags all at the same time.

The backing is a mostly denim. I wanted this quilt to be fairly sturdy. I even toyed with the idea of using an indoor/outdoor fabric on the back. But, I realized that the quilt would have to be dry cleaned if I did that so that quickly got voted down. I decided to use an old standby for durability – denim – and realized that Elizabeth from Oh Fransson! recently used the same for her picnic quilt! How fun is that. I wanted to just put denim on the back but, I guess I underestimated the amount that I would need. So, I pieced strips of leftover fabric from the front and made an elongated hexagon  out of it to add to the back.  (The following image only shows one half of the backing because the grass was a little damp and I didn’t want the front to get muddy.)

I pieced my label into the denim backing. The quilt wasn’t named until after it was completed so I simply added the name to the label.

Naming quilts can be very difficult for me. I think I have a hard time naming them because I’m too close to them.  After working on them for so long, it’s hard for me to step back and look at the bigger picture. Lucky for me I have the “bestest quilt namer” in all the world in my corner, my girlfriend Courtney! All I have to do is snap a picture with my phone and shoot it across the miles to Texas where she lives. She is so awesome and comes up with so many amazing names! They are so great that I want to use them all! For this quilt she started off with the concept of “Hexed” as in a spell and from that came up with “Love Potion #9″. Genius! It was especially perfect since this will be used as a Picnic Quilt for two, hence the “Love Potion”. And, it has 9 Hexagon’s in it! Yay! Thanks Courtney for coming up with so many amazing names for my quilts!

Stay posted for the tutorial for this quilt as well as lots of cool picnic accessories!