Hand Piecing

There are still many quilters out there who hand piece. Many of us find it very relaxing and enjoyable. Others use it to get precise points and edges on blocks that would be very difficult to piece by machine. I sort of fall into both categories. I also hand piece for convenience, oddly enough. As a mother with 3 boys, time in the sewing room is a precious commodity. I sometimes don't even get to go in there for any amount of time for days. That can put a serious crimp in piecing quilts and quilting them.

Currently, my main sewing machine is set up for free motion quilting. That makes it difficult to switch easily from quilting to piecing mode. I also want to keep it set up until my current quilt being quilted is complete. It has 48 blocks in it, each needing extra quilting to hold the batting in place. It's slow going, but it's turning out beautiful.

Back to hand piecing. I currently have a total of 3 quilts and 1 block in hand piecing mode. I've never been too good at staying with a single quilt until it was finished. *smile* The current one I'm working on, and have been for several days now, is one that could actually be pieced by machine easily enough. So I guess that begs the question of, "why are you hand piecing it?" Well, it's simple really. When I started it, I was deep in 'hand piecing mode.' When I got sick and tired of one hand piecing project (it's still not finished), I started looking around for something else to work on. My son's quilt was finally all cut out and ready to start piecing. It was available and easy to grab when I went looking. It's an I-Spy quilt using the Hexagon Star pattern. I started thinking that it was never going to get done last night. So I sat down, counted out how many hexagons I still had to do, multiplied that by 2 because that's what the sewing machine instructions say to do, put 2 triangles on opposite sides before sewing them all together. In hand piecing, it works differently, but the counting idea works the same. *smile*

So, I sat counting out hexagons. I can't believe how many I cut out! My kids are going to get completely overwhelmed by this quilt. I still found it a lot of fun looking at the patterns I'd picked though. *smile* Okay... I have 80 hexagons left to sew in. See, a lot of them. Multiply that by 2 and you end up with 160. Wow. You know what? I don't have that many triangles ready to sew. I tend to only make a few at a time. It gets boring drawing them and cutting them out. Anyway!! That gives me 240 total pieces left for this top to be finished (we'll just ignore how the edge gets finished for now). I'm not sure how many are already in there because I didn't feel like counting those ones. LOL So, here's my goal. With 240 pieces left, if I did at least 3 pieces a day, then I should have a finished quilt top in 80 days.

You know. When I hand piece, I do it in a circular pattern. Take the hexagon. I started on one side, put on a triangle, then continued around the edge of the hexagon until all the triangles were in place. Then, I went around all the triangles putting in the next 'round' of hexagons. And so on and so forth. What this does is allow you to keep a longer sewing thread going. Less cutting and tying off. If I remember correctly, it also makes it stronger because the thread is spread out among more pieces so it takes the stress off of one single section.

Hmm... I guess I should count the triangles I have and then start making more of them. I'd hate to come to a screeching halt again just because I ran out of triangles! That's what happened to me last time. That was very annoying. Oh, the idea of holding up a finished quilt top in about 80 days that I actually hand pieced is an incredible idea!

Umm... I think I'll just ignore the fact that I don't know how to quilt it yet. I really don't relish the idea of hand quilting it even though it would be really weird machine quilting it after taking all that time to hand piece it. LOL Oh, well. It's my quilt, I can do what I want... So there!