Hexie Pillow

I just finished a new throw pillow. When we moved in November I wanted to make all new throw pillow covers for the living room. At our old house the pillows were covered in a blue waffle weave fabric that I cut from an old shower curtain (don’t worry it was 100% cotton). We had lived with them for a while and I was tired of them. Plus I had a new awesome house and I wanted new awesome decor to go with. I checked in with C (my husband) and D (our housemate) about colors and themes for the living room. (They have to live here too.) I really wanted bold black and white prints, but they wanted warmer neutrals. I ended up getting a nice warm gray, which I think was a nice compromise, and recovered most of the pillow inserts. Except I forgot about one. I think I got tired of sewing pillows, or I had to go cook dinner and never came back to it or something else, but whatever it was I had one sad, naked pillow insert hanging out in my sewing room for the last couple of months.

I saw this on Sew Mama Sew a few weeks ago and totally fell in love. I have done a lot of different little projects with English Paper Piecing, but those have often resulted in an odd collection of hexagons in a ziplock and no clear project. This time was going to be different. I would plan!

I went home and dug through the scrap bin, picked a bunch of scraps I liked and then sorted them by color. I ended up with more color piles then I really wanted (neutral, black, pink, purple, yellow, light blue and dark blue) so I asked my husband to choose his three favorite. It just so happened that he picked very similar colors to the Sew Mama Sew example (which was totally fine with me). 

I started to cut out the stars, but I felt like they were too big, so I went back to just regular 1 1/2 inch hexies. I cut them all out of heavier scrapbook paper and used basting glue to baste them on. Then I laid out all the hexes in a pleasing design (I wanted a few clumps of color on a mostly all neutral background). I flipped them over and numbered them so that I would be able to sew them together in the order I wanted.

I’ve been working on it for the last few weeks when we watch TV in the evenings. I finally had a chance to finish it over the weekend while we were snowed in and I was sick. I ended up having to add another row of hexes on the top and one side so that it would fit the pillow form I have.

I made the back out of the same gray that all the other pillows are made out of. I just did my usual envelope cover, it is easier than a zipper and as long as you have enough overlap (on this one I did 3 1/2 inches) it looks great.

It turned out that the pillow cover was a little smaller than the pillow, but I think it looks good being a little stuffed and firmer.

Wedding Bunting Quilt in progress

It has been six months since my husband and I got married and I am finally getting a chance to put together some of the memorabilia from the wedding. A few weeks ago I took all the cards we got and punched holes with my mini punch along the side and threaded bakers twine through the holes to make a "book." I also did this with the cards I got at my bridal shower (which was almost a year ago, some projects take a while).

One of the biggest projects before the wedding was cutting out all the bunting. It was lots of weekends going through the scrap bin, ironing and ending up with pinking shear claw hand. I had lots of help from my mom and my bridesmaids but I also cut a lot out myself. And then my mom like a total champ sewed them all to bias tape. I think we ended up with something like 300 feet of bunting. And check it out, it was so worth it.

So since the bunting was such a big project before the wedding, of course it is turning into a big project after the wedding. I'm making a quilt!

I wanted the triangles to look like they where hanging in the sky so I cut them all away from the bias tape and sorted them into light and medium/dark. I also sorted the medium and dark triangles into green and blue because I wanted them to be evenly distributed. When we where cutting the bunting out we had a template but if a scrap was just a little too small we used it anyway. Fluttering in the breeze 20 feet in the air it was hard to tell that they weren't all exactly identical, but when making a quilt it makes things a little more difficult.  Oh well.

By now I have all the rows sewed together, but I laid it out on the living room floor and it is oriented wrong. With the points of the dark triangles pointing down, the quilt is a rectangle with a landscape orientation, but I want it to be a portrait orientation. So now I have to figure out how many triangles to take off each row to  make new rows and try to have it come out even.

I need to either take off two dark triangles and two light triangles or three of each. If I take off two from each of the eight rows that would give me 16 dark triangles to work with and 11 left in the other rows. That would mean I would only get one more row and have five of left over. But if I take off three dark triangles from each of the eight rows that would give me 24 to work with, 10 left in each row so I would get two more rows and have four left over which I could incorporate into the back, or if I'm strategic about which ones I take off I could get rid of a few of the fabrics I'm not super fond of. (The baby blue with brown polka dots came from a secret Santa thing at work last year and it is far from being my favorite fabric ever.)
I'll post again once I get it figured out and once the whole quilt is finished.