Prep work

The last couple days have been pretty uneventful in the sewing realm. I am preparing for being away from my machine for the week while it goes out for cleaning and/or repair. I decided that I'd go the hexie hand-stitching route for my Urban Home Goods partner's first little goodie so today—instead of driving to a bunch of LQSs to track them down—I made myself some 1.5" hexie papers and have been printing and cutting my own out of cardstock.  Tedious, I know, but it helped that I made some custom 8.5 x 11sheets of 8 hexies each which could be cut more easily than the typical hexie graph paper you can find online. If you want to use my template, feel free—the jpg is below. Just make sure you print at 100% which will probably mean printing with your borderless letter-sized setting on your printer. 

The nice thing about this custom sheet is that you can cut angles in fell swoops and be really methodical about how you cut these apart. I noticed that when I cut hexies out of the straight up graph paper you can find online, that I have a hard time cutting around each individual side of each individual hexagon shape and that I was tending to snip into the neighboring ones. On these, I simply cut along the long diagonal lines and then cut along short diagonal lines and then clip off the remaining triangles. If you give it a go, you'll see what I mean.

This weekend I also started prepping for the Single Girl Support Group quilt a long which will be starting in February. I bought my template plastic yesterday and spent the evening tracing and cutting all 30-some odd template pieces. 

This afternoon I decided to look at my templates again and wanted to lay them out to see how big each circle really is (I was thinking of starting small in the quilt-a-long by just doing 2 shams instead of a quilt) and realized a few things.

First, each circle is huge! I now have to decide if I want to just make one for my living room or two for our bedroom or if I just want to go ahead and commit to 4 and make a baby/lap blanket.

Secondly, I discovered that when I line up each template piece on top of its neighboring piece and line up the curves and the seam allowance markings, like so . . . 

my templates do not create a closed circle. Hmmm. This seems problematic, does it not?

I've taken every single template piece and laid it back on top of the original template design in the pattern to discover that my templates are spot-on. This is not a cutting or tracing error . . . at least not as far as I can tell.

Can anyone else explain this? Is it simply a matter of there being some easing in this pattern? Did I go terribly wrong somewhere? Has anyone else already cut their templates for the quilt-a-long and found the same thing? HELP!

So, tonight I might go to bed a bit frustrated. This was a 4-hour project last night that took 2 movies and several cups of coffee to complete. I'm hoping that there's a reason the pieces don't line up and I'm just being silly in thinking that they should. 

Or not.