Or Hex Me Not!

When I am designing a quilt, I can either work or I can take pictures. When I take pictures you get to see a lot of step by step, but it slows me down. When I work, I make decisions, make changes and don't take pictures. It goes faster.

So you are going to have to take my word for it when I tell you I tried placing big colored hexagon stars all over the quilt, but I just didn't like them. I also didn't like the value changes of the dark purple hex stars and the light ones. I mean, they were pretty and everything, and you cold really SEE the hex star shapes, but they took over the design, and I didn't have much flexibility about where they went in the quilt. To be complete, they had to live near the center, and close to each other. I could have spread them apart but then I would have been making a king sized quilt and I DID NOT want to make a quilt that ginormous. I also didn't want them to take over. Like four Divas.

In the end I decided all the hex stars would be DARK and COOL colors and the diamonds floating around and inside them would be LIGHT and WARM colors. I also rearranged them slightly so the design was more centered than it was yesterday.

The other interesting thing that happens is that once I started filling in all the pink and orange diamonds, the hexagon stars disappeared into the background. Part of that was my decision to make them all dark, or similar in value. They are still there, but the viewer will notice them gradually, which is what I prefer anyway. I put the pink and orange diamonds in the centers arbitrarily, but before I start sewing this together, I will take a good hard look at their placement and tinker with them so there aren't too many in one spot and they are distributed more-or-less evenly throughout the quilt.

This is one design that looks dramatically different when looking at it through the camera as opposed to looking at it in real life. As soon as I looked at it in the camera I knew I would chop the design across the top and bottom as shown in the photo above, with the orange fabric strip going through the blocks horizontally.

In every quilt I like to have something that whacks you upside the head, that makes you sit up and take notice, that's something you see and think, "how did I miss this the first time I looked at it?" I'll leave it to you to work out what I did, and it might not stay just like that. We'll see. And I ran out of orange and pink slab triangles, which is why a couple of places are empty. I'm not going to leave them like that!


For more information about making these scrap slab triangle quilts, you can get my tutorial here, on my Etsy shop. It's an instant download, so you can get started right away.