Flower Garden Hexagons

Day 310: "What's next?" That question is often posed by my loyal readers, but not nearly as often as it is heard inside my head. In this case, the decision was made for me when I discovered a pile of cut-out hexagons while looking for fabrics for a different quilt. They'd been hidden so long I'd forgotten all about them, or indeed what my original intent had been with respect to a pattern. I decided to assemble them as a traditional Flower Garden, keeping each grouping more or less to a particular colour scheme rather than making them entirely random. Two "flowers" were already sewn together, so I laid out the rest of the prints to see how many more I could make. In the end, I wound up cutting new fabric for four "flowers," which I then assembled for a total of 39 blocks.

Although the prints had been ready to sew, the white background hexagons still needed to be marked and cut. While precision cutting is not a requirement for this pattern, precision marking is mandatory. If the edges of the hexagons are marked precisely, sewing them together is almost trouble-free. However, each side has to be sewn as a short seam backstitched at both ends, and at the end of each seam, the thread is cut. The sewing wastes a lot of thread, but it's worth it in the final accounting to be able to turn tidy corners. In fact, assembly goes rather quickly if accuracy is maintained. That said, it takes a bit of concentration to place the blocks in the right order. The finished design is laid out for you to see in the inset. The edges of the outer hexagons will be appliqued to a white border, and then the whole project will be hand-quilted.