Secret Garden Hexie Quilt

Part 2: Basting your Shapes and Stitching.

Baste the hexagons:

1. Place a hexagon in the centre of a fabric square. (Dobbing a little glue to hold it in place can be helpful!)

Tips for basting: I broke this step down and got my six year old to dob each hexagon and centre it on a square. It was great to watch her improve quickly to get the hexagons right in the centre! Any that were a bit off, I just quietly peeled off and adjusted. ;)

Watch the video to see how much glue I use. I just move across the side once or twice. If you can, lean away from the edge. Too much glue on the edge of the paper makes it trickier to sew through because glue gets stuck in the fabric fold.

It can be handy to do a trial run - glue baste a few hexies, wait a little to dry, stitch, and then see if you can peel the fabric off. If the paper is coming off on the paper, or if it’s too hard to sew to sew through, you’re using too much glue or are too close to the edge.

2. Run a little line of glue down one edge of the hexagon and fold the fabric over to fix it to the paper shape. Turn the shape a little and glue (baste) the following edge. Keep glueing and folding the fabric in place until the hexagon is basted.

3. Baste all your fabric pieces to your hexagons and half hexagons.

Stitching with kids: If you’re happy for uneven stitches, kids can stitch hexagons together from a pretty young age. My older kids were 4 when they first had a go! (my 6 yr old hasn’t yet been keen.) I would thread the needle for them, put a knot in the end or do the first few stitches, and then hand it over. The trickiest thing for them is keeping the thread threaded through the needle. Show your kids how to hold the needle at the eye, so they keep the thread steady.

My 9 and 12 year old can now both thread the needle, and start and stop on their own. They naturally sewed their stitches closer together than I did, but I didn’t correct them. Closer isn’t a problem if they’re happy!

Notes for stitching for beginners: My stitches are generally about 10-12 per inch. Further apart than traditionally taught, but they hold together and wash just fine.

Make sure you just stitch through the fabric folds. If you stitch too deep, you’ll go through the paper and they’ll be harder to remove.

4. Place two hexagons right sides together (this just means the flat sides facing each other, and the backs facing out). Choose a corner and stitch through both pieces. Stitch through the same place a few times, and in the last stitch, put your needle through the loop before pulling the thread tight. This creates a knot.

5. “Whipstitch” (see video above) along the edge of the hexagon. Create the same knot at the end also. Snip the thread.

6. Repeat with a second pair of hexagons.

Note about layout: For this quilt, I get you to sew the hexagons together into ‘diamond’ blocks before creating rows. You could, if you preferred, lay your pieces out, decide the layout, and sew the hexagons into rows immediately. But my favourite part of English Paper Piecing is sewing blocks. They are smaller in your hand, easier to transport, and you can enjoy the peaceful fun of choosing fabrics that you like together.

7. Sew the two pairs of hexagons together to make a diamond like shape. The easiest way to find the two seams to sew together is to lay the pairs next to each other, and then flip the second pair over the first, keep the seam aligned. (see video above!) Once you get to a corner, stitch a couple of extra stitches in the corner, and then line up the next two edges to sew together. (see video below!)

8. Make (36) diamonds, (6) triplets by just adding a single hexagon to a pair, and (7) pairs. Set the (12) half hexagons aside for now.

9. Sew (6) diamond blocks into a column. Add a triplet to the end of the column. Make 6 columns.

Note for stitching with kids: My kids really enjoyed sewing the columns together, and got the hang of folding the hexagons to join the next seam really quickly! Once we were up to sewing the rows together, however, they quickly lost interest. By this stage the quilt is getting heavy and trickier to wrangle. So I sew the columns together in pairs, and then handed it back to them to take the middle papers out.

10. Make a final column from the (7) hexie pairs sewn end to end.

11. Lay your columns out in a way that creates a pleasing balance of colours. Number your columns or snap a photo for reference.

12. Sew your columns together one at a time, and remove the papers once a row is completely surrounded. Doing so as you go makes the quilt a bit lighter to handle for sewing subsequent rows.

13. Sew the half hexagons into the gaps at the top and bottom of the quilt. (I like adding these bits till last because they create an extra opportunity to spread colours out and create balance with quiet or loud fabrics.)