1.30.2011

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.






5 comments:

Splendorfalls said...

This pattern scares me. I was just psyching myself up too...telling myself I could do it...now I'm not so sure! =)

I am really interested in the paper piecing idea someone had. That seems so much more my speed! Ha!

What color are you using for the solid? I can't decide. I'm sort of thinking cream, but I do think a color would be pretty too....hmmm....decisions decisions!

Anonymous said...

Holy cow. Seriously? I'm still waiting for my pattern to arrive. Good thing there's a support group! We can do it! I know we can! If you figure out the problem please let us know... Maybe some of those pieces repeat somewhere along the circle and you just haven't read that part yet?

Rachel at Stitched in Color said...

Oh dear. Definitely would scare me! I'm not planning on being a Single Girl, and I feel like the only one. I think we need a support group.

But, on the upside, your hexie template is GENIUS. Smart girl.

Lee said...

Hmm, that's interesting. All I can tell you is, if your templates are spot on, I think you'll be fine. I've made this pattern (king-size!) and it actually ended up being easier than I thought it would be. It was a lot of work to make the templates and cut all the pieces, but it came together just fine in the end, and is more forgiving than you might think.

BuggletQuilts said...

Do you possibly reuse some of the other 'going around the corner' templates from the other side? I can't wait to see what you decide to commit to.