Quilting Progress - March 2024

I thought I would do a quick post, to bring you up to scratch on the progress I've made on the Hexi Star quilt that I've been working on for probably the last 4 months. I think I last posted about this quilt in November last year, when I'd completed 2 or 3 of the star blocks. I've now completed 10 large star blocks for this quilt.

I changed tack a little on the second five, as I decided to use fabrics of another colour in these blocks, namely green, so the main colours for the quilt are now navy, red and dark green. The reason for this, is that I had quite a few different fabrics in this colourway, that were similar to the fabrics I had used in a red colourway, so I thought they would possibly go well together and it would add a bit of extra interest to the quilt and help use up more fabrics from my stash.

I recently laid all of the star blocks out together, to see how they blended. Here's a photo of what they looked like when I did:

It's a pretty random quilt, but I quite like that about it, no two blocks are the same. You will see that two blocks have been outlined with a row of navy hexagons.  All of the stars and other blocks in this quilt will also be outlined in this way and this should help bring together all the different colours and shapes of blocks when all are sewn together and make the actual blocks stand out. You can just about see from the second photo how the blocks will fit together. I'm actually reasonably happy with how well they go together. I think because the navy is used with both colourways, that it helps with continuity. This probably isn't the final layout, I'll play around with it when all the blocks are completed.

Now that all the hexi star blocks are done, I have moved on to another part of the process of making this quilt and that is to make some smaller blocks in the shape of diamonds, using the same fabrics in different combinations. These diamonds will fill the space between the points of the star blocks and I think I will need to make between 40 and 50 to complete the quilt. I have started to make a few of these blocks already to show you what they look like. These are really enjoyable to work on, as they are much smaller and quicker to make, only using 9 hexies. Here's a picture of the ones I've completed thus far:

I will also need to source some more plain navy fabric to fill in between the star and diamond blocks in order to complete this project, as I don't currently have enough, so this will, of course, involve a trip to one of my favourite places to buy fabric. It is a particular London high street where there are lots of different fabric shops, so I'll very much look forward to that. I don't really want to buy more fabric, but I have virtually no plain fabrics in my stash and they are necessary to make the kind of quilts I like to make. I will try to use up any fabric I do buy in this project if I can. This will actually be the only thing that I have actually had to buy to make this quilt, which feels good, as it means I am gradually finding a use for the fabric that I already have at home.  This is what I love most about EPP patchwork projects, they are great for stash busting.

I'll keep you posted as the project progresses and the different blocks get sewn together.