The plastic bag of Red / White pieces lurked next to my sewing machine beckoning for some attention.
After the tediousness of the beige and yellow diagonal I couldn’t imagine that the red/white one would be more complicated so I opened the bag and began the matching process to see what had been done 30 years ago that summer we moved from Texas back to Colorado.
The fabrics were sorted stacked in similar piles and pressed flat to get rid of the crinkles from being enclosed in the bag for so long. It looked like a daunting task, but little by little the pieces seems to start matching up. Some hexagons were completed. Some were missing a section or two. Triangle pieces were pinned together ready to sew with the tiniest pins I have seen. I unpinned them and sorted them back into similar piles. I put aside those tiny pins to use the quilting pins that had become my favorite over the years.
It seems that in the 70’s I had sewn the triangles together on the machine and then together into the hexagon by hand. Maybe my Mom, Frances, had helped with the hand sewn as I’m not much of a hand sewer myself.
With all the strip and assembly line sewing methods that I had been using from Eleanor Burns direction, I decided that there was a faster way. I had a bolt of white left from my Mom’s stash of fabrics. This was probably something she had bought for this red/white quilt years ago and there is was still available to finish up this project.
For the red hexagons with white centers, I cut 3″ strips out of the white and lay the red pieces along the strips as I assembly line sewed them together. This worked pretty well to sew up stacks of the reds. I carefully cut out the pieces into the triangle shapes. There were fewer red middles so I just did the old fashion way by sewing each of the small pieces together matching white borders with red middles assembly line style.
Once these were pressed with every other triangle toward middle or away from the middle so it would lock together better, it was time to start assembling them into hexagons. Pinning at the border where the red and white came together seemed to kept the unit matching at the seams.
The matching in the center is the most important. I put 2 triangle units together, sewed on the third, then pressed this flat with seams going the same direction. Once there were 2 three part sections, I pinned the middle triangle point to match the other piece, pinned the borders so they would match and sewed the two pieces together.
As the pattern that was originally intended was long lost, I laid out the pieces on the floor trying to come up with the best pattern. It seems all those previous tries as finding the right mixed with strips of each color (white borders and red borders) or trying to start in the middle and keep adding on a row finally disappeared as the real pattern emerged.
Once I had some success sorting and sewing the pieces together, I wanted to know the plan for a finished quilt. As I laid out some of the finished hexagon pieces they just seemed to fall into place. It idea was that I would have blocks of hexagons that would be sewn into a larger quilt. It looked like a flower with a white center and six red units around the center. With six “flowers” the quilt would be big enough as a throw. The flower units could be connected with extra hexagons in alternating colors.
The border of the quilt reflected part of the hexagon. It would be more difficult to finish it off. It made sense to add half hexagons along the top and a solid piece of red along the sides. A strip of this same solid piece would be added to the top and bottom to tie it all together.
I figured out how many red borders and white borders were needed. I was about 20 short on the reds and had plenty of the whites for this pattern. As I sewed all the previously cut units together the finished hexagons stacked up waiting to be made into a quilt. There were a few units that were missing pieces. I pulled out the boxes of fabric sorted mostly by color that were stored in the garage. Sure enough there were a couple of stacks of red fabric were the pieces that were saved from years ago. I found just the fabrics needs to complete the missing pieces. It seems that these reds were purchased in quarter yard units of 10 or 15 different patterns. Today I usually buy 2 or 3 yards to spread the colors around several quilts or use as borders.
The unit measurements were as follows:
Border of triangle – Trapezoid 3″ x 3 1/4″ sides x 6″
Top of triangle – Equilateral 3″ x 3″ x 3″
I needed to true up the hexagons and had been unable to find the anything that would work at the stores. My husband Stan, cut a piece of Plexiglas, smoothed the edges and scribed the six units across the top. It works great to true up the units.