A quilty experiment on the wedding quilt

I decided to dig back into the wedding quilt project--no more procrastination. My sewing machine is still out of commission, but my dear Dad, a retired electrical engineer, wants to take a look at her before I take her into the shop! So that whole situation is on hold for a day or two.

Since this quilt needs to be fairly large, it needs a substantial number of blocks. The fabric involved has a 24" repeat, so when I began the project, I cut 6 layers of fabric, each layer 42" wide by 24" long--that is 4 yards of fabric!! I cut one full set of hexagons exactly as the book said cutting strips on the lengthwise grain and sewing them into half blocks with the straight-of-grain edge to the outside of the hexagons--all ready for lay out. I went beyond the book's technique for aligning the 6 layers of fabric by making random tacking stitches throughout the 24" x 42" area to align and hold the layers (see here how I hand stitched through 6 layers aligning the tips of this leaf motif).

Since that first batch won't be nearly enough blocks, I again layered 6 more layers of fabric--and then kind of froze up on this project.

My concern was that if I cut this set of hexagons the same way, following book instructions (even if I offset the cutting lines a little to make the strips "different" from the first batch), the blocks were going to look too much alike to the first set. So today I conducted an experiment that would possibly help me find a new way to cut hexagon building blocks from this second round of fabric that will be totally different from the first batch and STILL have a straight-of-grain edge on the outside of the hexagons.

My thought was that I could make test hexagons using paper and compare the appearance of hexagons made from strips cut from the lengthwise grain vs. hexagons made from horizontal grain cut strips. So I took my second 6 layers of fabric to the copy shop and made 12 photocopies of a section of the fabric.


Then I made two stacks of six copies each and stapled them together at the outermost edges. One set would be cut into strips on the "lengthwise grain," just as the book suggests (and as I did for the first set of hexagons). The second stack of six photocopies would be cut into strips on the "horizontal grain."

The strips would then be sub cut into 60 deg. triangles for making hexagons. I am using the 60 deg. ruler from Creative Grids to cut my triangles.

As each set of paper triangles was cut, I marked them as coming from either a horizontal "grain" strip or a lengthwise "grain" strip, and I marked the straight-of-grain edge so that I could tape together the hexagons with the straight of grain to the outside of each hexagon (you might be able to see a squiggly line on each triangle):

The end result: I got a total of 6 horizontal grain paper hexagons and 8 lengthwise grain paper hexagons--all of them resulting from the same 8 1/2" x 11" paper photocopy of my fabric--and : they were ALL DIFFERENT!

Now I know conclusively that I can cut my second batch of fabric on the horizontal grain and construct my hexagons with the straight of grain to the outside edge and that they will all be unique from the first batch of hexagons I constructed when I began this project! I hope this result will get me moving again on this project so that the happy couple can receive their quilt some reasonable time before their first anniversary!

(I am chuckling to myself as I proof this post--my degrees are in chemistry and I used to work in a lab setting--I guess doing experiments is in my blood!)