I’ve devoted all of my energy this week to the Batik Flower Garden Quilt. I finished a second row of burgundy flowers on two sides of the central medallion.

I went to the trouble of placing the piece pictured above on my queen sized bed to get an idea of how large I want the central medallion to grow. It was easy to see that I could add at least two more rows, and so i did.

While I am certain that it was right to add those two rows of flowers to the central medallion, I am not sure if I should add two more columns of flowers also, and I don’t know whether or not I should add another two rows while I’m at it. I have to take into consideration how many batik flowers I have left to use. I also need to take into account how close I want the next design element to be to the edge of the bed. I am planning to add a border of solid flowers like the ones below to outline the burgundy border. I don’t want that outline to butt up exactly to the edge of the bed.

The good news is that I have a little more design flexibility because I found the pieces that I thought I had left behind in New York City. I noticed them in my studio the other day. This gives me five more batik flowers I can use. Here are the pieces I thought were lost forever.

The pieces above will free up five batik flowers if I disassemble them. There is also a small piece that I had put together when I was trying out a possible layout of flowers. I can cannibalize that to free up another three batik flowers. Add those eight flowers to the 19 that I have in a pile and that makes 27 batik flowers I can add into this design if I choose to do so.

In order to come to a final decision about how I am going to flesh out this design I think it would be helpful to piece together the remaining two borders of burgundy hexagons. That is what I have been working on these past few days. I don’t have those borders finished yet, but here you can see the progress on these borders.

Above is the border to go along the bottom. Below is the border to go along the right side.

After I finish these two borders I will place all of the pieces on the queen sized bed to get an idea of what more I would like to add.

When I last reported on the Batik Flower Garden Quilt there were 50 flowers on the quilt top, Since then I have added ten new flowers along the edge, and I have a pile of ten more flowers pieced and ready to be added.

You can probably see that there is a new color in the mix. I decided that I wanted to do a dark border around a center medallion. I wanted to make this border using flowers having the same crimson center as all of the other flowers. I wanted the petals of the flowers to be one color only, not two like the others because I wanted to create the impression of a background fabric. I also wanted the color to be dark enough to provide sufficient contrast with the crimson center so the center hexagon would continue to pop out from the surface. I consulted my Kona Solids sample card and decided on burgundy. I could not be happier with my choice.  I love this color. It is such a pleasure to work with. In fact, this is a new favorite color of mine, right up there with hunter green. It is actually a tie between those two colors for my favorite at this point.

I am planning on a double or triple border of the burgundy flowers before I decide what else to add. The single hunter green hexagons will continue to hold the piece together as I add the burgundy flowers. Those single green and crimson hexagons will dance across the surface of the quilt top all the way to the border, or close to it. I may finish the edge with just burgundy so none of the green hexagons touch the binding.

I’ve got a nice pile of burgundy flowers ready to add to the border. Below you can see how a double border of burgundy flowers will look. I am currently adding these burgundy flowers to only two of the borders. It remains to be seen whether I will be adding more rows to the central medallion or not. I’ll be auditioning the quilt top on my queen sized bed to see how I will be proceeding after I have two double borders of burgundy flowers completed.

The Diamond Quilt has become too large to carry around with me. Therefore, everything has to be done at home now. After completing my binding torture experiment I decided to to add one last row of hunter green hexagons along the edge of the quilt top. All along the way during the construction of this quilt top I have kept track of my time. Sometimes I estimated my time by seeing how long a specific section would take, and then I simply completed the other corresponding sections at my leisure, and did the math to come up with a total for the time spent. All that remains now is the last border of hexagons on the quilt top. I’ve decided to time that step with the stop watch.  I’ll do the same for the basting, quilting, and binding. When it is all said and done I will be interested to calculate the number of hours spent per square foot of finished product.

I’ve worked nearly seven hours so far on the last row of hexagons. I’ve added 66 hexagons so far, and I’m not even halfway done. My time spent comes to a little over six minutes per hexagon for three seams. That feels slow, but I don’t like to rush.

Following are photographs of the last row of hexagons being added. The first two photographs show the quilt top from the front and the back with the paper pieces still in place.

The next two photographs show the quilt top from the front and the back after the paper pieces have been removed.

You may notice that the last row of hexagons was basted so that the basting stitches do not show at all from the front. These basting stitches do not need to be removed. The row just before the last is basted so the stitches show from the front, and those stitches must be removed. The “invisible” basting method takes more time, but I decided to use it for the final row because it would stabilize the seams when I removed the papers. I also thought that this method of basting would add to my stitching pleasure as I completed the final row of hexagons. I was right. I am really enjoying adding the final row of hexagons. It is such a peaceful activity.

I’m listening to an audio book as I add this final row of hexagons. The book will probably be finished before I compete the final row of hexagons. Interestingly enough, the book is titled “The Seamstress”. It is a fictional account of a Hungarian Jew who lived through the Holocaust.

A look at the back of the quilt top shows that I used the method of basting that requires removal of basting threads for the majority of the quilt top. The trimmed seams devoid of basting stitches have a certain simplistic beauty to them. When I showed my paper piecing work at an artist’s meet up group a few months ago the attendees focused on the beauty of the back of the work as well as the beauty of the front. I hadn’t thought about it until they drew my attention to how beautiful the back was. I then started to appreciate the beauty of what would eventually be hidden from view.

While that method of basting has it’s aesthetic merits, it also presents the need to trim basting stitches that don’t quite work their way free, but do manage to get pulled to the back side when the paper pieces are removed.

I think there are definite advantages to both methods of basting. That might be a good subject for a future blog post.

What method do you use to baste your hexagons? Why do you use it? Have you tried both methods?

It is September already, so my two month binding torture experiment has come to an end. I kept my ugly little binding sample on the dryer along with a tally sheet. I threw the sample in with every wash and dry for two months. My husband also washes clothes occasionally, and he chose not to take part in the data collection, so there are fewer washes and dries than there would have been if I did all the wash myself. This binding was sent through 22 regular wash and dry cycles. It was also sent through 19 gentle wash and dry cycles for a total of 41 cycles. This is much more wear and tear than any binding could expect to experience in the lifetime of a quilt since I would never send a quilt through even one regular cycle, much less 22 of them. The idea was to torture the piece, however, and torture it I did.

The piece is extra crinkly, but the binding has held up well. There is one place along one of the corners of the binding that has frayed a bit. I’m not concerned with that, however, because that could have happened with any binding.

I was only interested in seeing if any of the tiny seams near the edge came undone because of the excessive washing.  None of the seams have come lose, so I feel confident in using this binding method on my diamond heirloom quilt.

I will begin adding the final row of hunter green hexagons around the diamond quilt this week.

I’ve made progress on the batik flower garden quilt, but I will save that report for a future week. As I move forward working on more than one project at a time I will probably report on one or another of those projects each week, but not all of them. I will sum up the activity that has taken place since that project was last featured. I think that will be more interesting than reporting bits and pieces of progress on multiple projects each week.

Now that this binding method has proven to be viable, I am considering writing a pdf tutorial for it and making it available.

Whoops.

I didn’t even notice that it had been a year.

On August 23rd the one year anniversary of my first blog post passed without notice on my part. I kind of knew it was coming up, but I didn’t think about it much, and it passed unnoticed even by me.

So, what’s happened in the last year?

Since August of last year I’ve started to blog once a week consistently, largely due to my participation in the link back to the Monday Morning Star Count over at Life Under Quilts.

I’ve gone from being a WordPress.com site to self hosting with Blue Host.

I’ve joined the Modern Quilt Guild.

For months I blogged in a vacuum with no comments on my site, but that changed once I started linking back, and now I usually get at least one comment a week.

I’ve completed quite a few projects for such a short period of time given the fact that the only machine work in any of them is the occasional application of binding via machine to the front of the piece. In addition to my interest in quilting I have also renewed my interest in blogging with WordPress, and also with Blogger. My once active blog Enriching My Love of the Game may soon see some activity. This will give me an opportunity to compare the two blogging platforms.

It’s been a good year.

I have added 23 more flowers to this quilt since I reported on my progress last week. At that point there were 17 flowers in the quilt and now there are 40. My work this week consisted of assembling pre constructed flowers along with the hunter green hexagons that hold the work together.

At this point it is necessary for me to make more solid flowers in order to continue. I ordered crimson, butterscotch, and mocha Kona solids, and they have arrived. I still have 22 batik flowers assembled to add to the quilt. However, no more batik flowers can be made because the brown batik fabric has been exhausted, although some of the yellow batik remains. I have not yet decided how big this quilt will get. I am currently leaning towards making a twin size quilt by fleshing out the edges with a border of crimson followed by an outer border of solid flowers. An alternative would be to make it into a baby quilt, although it does not have the feel of a baby quilt in terms of color and contrast.

My construction method has changed as I have progressed on the quilt. At first I was piecing rows and joining them.

I decided to try adding one flower at a time to the edge of the quilt and to wait to add the hunter green hexagons until all the flowers for the row had been added. That method proved to be less cumbersome than manipulating an entire row at once.

You can see that the insertion of the hunter green hexagons requires stitching on five sides of the hexagon. That didn’t prove to be inconvenient. In fact, it made it easier to be able to use my green thread to do the job without having to start and stop repeatedly as I had to do when adding the hunter green hexagons to a row.

Here the green hexagons have been successfully added to the row. The following two photos show the addition of a row of batik flowers.

Lori the cat felt the need to help.