Hexagon | Simple Bird Applique

I don’t think I am that different than anyone else when it comes to finding time to quilt. Lately, we have had our fair share of family barbecues, a couple of baptisms, weekends away and on and on and on!! I am trying my very best to squeeze in a few stolen moments here and there to work on my quilts. Here is what I have been working on….

Ladies of the Sea, a pattern by Sue Garman, caught my eye a while ago and I started working on the blocks last year. I decided to start one of the borders before I continued on with any more blocks, just to switch things up a bit!

I use the starch, stiletto and mini-iron method. This involves flipping the pattern over on to my light box and tracing the shapes. I don’t have the attention span to do all of my tracing at once, so I am constantly flipping my pattern over which is kind of annoying (and not an efficient way to work!). So I thought…Why can’t I just flip my freezer paper over instead of the pattern? So I traced the shapes onto the shiny side of the freezer paper using a Sharpie marker. (A Sharpie is the only thing I found that would leave a permanent mark and not smudge.)

Since I use 2 layers of freezer paper ironed together, I experimented and found if you place the shiny side with the markings on it on top of another sheet of freezer paper (paper side up, not shiny side up) the liquid starch will not make the Sharpie marks bleed all over your fabric! The traced lines are actually “captured” between 2 layers of freezer paper. Sweet!

Anyway, here is what I have accomplished so far. This pattern is available on my website Simple Bird Studio.

Last year, I discovered the joys of hand piecing using Inklingo. This is a hexie quilt I made earlier this year using Inklingo…

…and these are the leftover scraps, which I stitched into some log cabins blocks that will become part of the backing. I cut just cut and stitched, not worrying at all about matching colours or even the width of the strips. Very therapeutic!