Make Yourself a Hexie Little Christmas Tree

After seeing some mini quilts of hexie Christmas trees many months ago before I was even thinking of Christmas, I was inspired to go even smaller and use the idea to make Christmas cards.  By using ½" hexagons, the trees are the right size to fit on to an A6 folded card blank.

These cards are an ideal project to use up scraps of fabrics and you can soon have a small woodland of trees after just a few evenings of stitching.

To make it easier to glue the trees to the corrugated surface of my card blank, I first stitched the tree to backing paper. The trees can be embellished with a much or as little bling as you wish – I chose to add just a star to the top of the tree.

Full details on how to make the cards, including hexagon templates, can be found in my project section.

 

Quilt Finish

I finished my quilt a few weeks ago but had to wait a while for the weather to be good enough to get it washed and line-dried. There was a certain element of trepidation as I put it in the washing machine –would the cream backing come out pale pink – but a couple of colour catchers did their job and the red did not run.  I was hoping for some bright winter sunshine for the photographs, but “not raining” was as good as it got.

The backing is a Robert Kaufman fabric with woven pattern of circles that I got in the sale at Quiltessential and is pieced with the cream designs from the two French General layer cakes.  The binding is charcoal Color Weave that I picked up in the buy-by-weight section at Abakhans. All piecing and quilting was done with Aurifil 50 wt.

Despite spending several hours working on a layout so that the same or similar prints were not together, whilst snuggled under the quilt I spotted I had not been successful. I think I should just enjoy the quilt and not look too closely again.

Quilt Decisions Made

At the end of my last post, I was undecided how to back the quilt I was making, but the more I thought about it, the less it made sense to go and buy fleece when I already had backing fabric and wadding and so the decision was made to make a “proper” quilt.

A piece of unidentified wadding I picked up as end of roll remnant was just about big enough and I used the spare low volume pieces from the layer cakes to make a pieced section for the backing fabric to bring that up to size.

I did wonder whether it would be possible to tack this on the kitchen table, but thanks to some advice from Mary via Instagram (who pointed me in the direction of this blog post) and a large piece of MDF, I managed to get the quilt sandwich assembled at home.

I was hoping to only have to do straight line quilting, but I couldn’t be sure whether the batting would support a gap of approximately 6”. Checking online it appeared that most batting seemed to be able to be quilted 4” or 10” apart, and so I added a motif in the centre of each square just to be on the safe side.

My final task at the weekend was to machine stitch the binding ready for hand sewing at Sewing Club on last Monday.  All that is left to do is to sew in the loose ends and wash it to remove the guidelines I drew for each motif.

All quiet on the sewing front

Things have been quiet on the blog as there has not been much sewing going on. It seems that my sewing get-up-and-go has got up and gone. Even though I’ve not felt like sewing, I was missing not sewing, so last weekend I decided that it was time to dust off the sewing machine and sew something.

First to do was to make a belt loop for my husband’s jeans. This loop has been missing since the jeans were bought and was a fairly quick job once I had bleached the denim to the same shade. As my machine didn’t like sewing through all the layers, I had to find ways to get the same effect but sewing through fewer layers of fabric. In the end, a combination of machine and hand sewing resulted in a passable replacement.

Next was to start some selfish sewing for me. I’ve had two French General layer cakes (Chateau Rouge and Rounneries Deux) in my stash for over a year. Some of the fabrics I used earlier in the year to make my Mommy Poppins bag, but the rest were being saved for a quilt for me.  If  fabrics that I'd admired for so long couldn't get me sewing again, then nothing would. After putting to one side any solid or cream layers, I set about picking 21 red and 21 light layers and pairing them up to make “bordered square” blocks (on checking in my Barbara Brackman Encyclopedia of Pieced Quilt Patterns, I discovered that these are called "Blocks in a Box").

 

All the blocks were made in time for Monday’s LiverpoolSewing Club and I spent the entire evening trying to come up with the perfect “random” layout.  After seeing the photo of the final version from Monday, I’ve spotted a few blocks that I think need moving.

 

I’m wondering about using the solid layers to add a border and then there is the backing to consider. Part of me wants to do a “proper” quilt with wadding and using the cream layers in a pieced backing and part of me wants to do a quick quilt with just a fleece backing. Hopefully the sewing momentum will continue and you won't have too long to wait to find out what I decided to do.