Sunday Stash Report

The Sunday Stash Report is completely uninteresting today--nothing in and nothing out. Oh, wait, today is Monday, isn't it? No matter. I worked most of the week; but lest you think I was idle in the sewing room, I did finish the last Star BOM block, made a diamond hexagon block for the Great Hexagon Quilt Along, and knitted a little on my socks.

This past Friday was the first Casey's Quilters meeting of the new year. The planned project was these tissue box covers. I think maybe 9 or 10 ladies made them, but a couple ladies left early, so this was what was left. Everyone seemed to have a different brand of tissue, and every box was sized slightly differently, so each pattern had to be tweaked a little for a snug fit. Why don't they make these all the same size?

I decided not to make a tissue box cover and worked on this diamond hexagon block instead. Each hexagon finishes to one inch on each side, so roughly the block finishes to about 13-1/2" x 8.5". I think at this size I'd have to make 100 or more blocks to make a queen-sized quilt (gasp!). For a queen-sized quilt, a larger hexagon may be more appropriate, so I'm going to try a bigger hexagon that will finish to either 1-1/4" or 1-1/2" on each side. With a larger hexagon I may be able to machine piece at least some of them when I'm home. Either way it will take a month of Sundays to get them all done.

I handpieced this first block using the Inklingo software. With Inklingo you can print the hexagons, complete with cutting lines, stitching lines, and alignment marks, directly to fabric, thereby eliminating most of the prep work associated with English paper piecing. It's so much faster, and I can get right to the fun part--the stitching. Several different collections of shapes are available in the Inklingo format, and I can see myself wanting to try some other projects. Linda Franz, who conceived the idea of printing shapes directly to fabric, just released a new Apple Core collection. Imagine how easy it would be to print apple cores right to fabric instead of having to prepare templates and trace around each one! In my sidebar, the link for Inklingo takes you a page for hexagon quilters, but if you click here you can watch a free video explaining the concept.

BarbD had this quilt for Show and Tell. Isn't it beautiful? It's from the book Calming The Storm by Darlene Zimmerman and Joy Hoffman. What interested me about this quilt is that it uses the Tri-Recs rulers, which I bought last year for a project. The book shows some different ways to use these rulers, so I'll get more use from them.