Wednesday, August 14, 2013

Messing Around with Honeycombs

Seeing as they are new in the shop, I wanted to give the Simply Style precut Honeycomb hexies a try.  I have never made a hexagon quilt...or cushion cover...or even zippy pouch, so I was starting at the very beginning.

First, I downloaded the handy-dandy PDF piecing guide by Moda and gave it a quick read.  Steps 1 and 2 made sense to me, but I had a hard time envisioning Step 4.  Thinking that might be because Step 3 is missing in the guide and I really needed it, I had a peek at the Moda YouTube video on piecing Honeycombs.  Although they give a nice description of the piecing and show interesting variations on how you could use the precuts, they didn't actually show you how to piece the hexies.  I had to just dive in and give it a try.  I learn better by doing than reading anyway.


I unpacked my Honeycombs and brought them down to the TV with a little clipboard and my marking pen.  Included in the Honeycomb pack is a little plastic guide with six holes punched 1/4 inch from each corner.


When aligned, you can easily then mark a little dot in each corner.  I'd suggest you use a finer tip pen than I did.  My marking pen is a little fuzzy and mal-aligned now.  I should also say that the brown edge you see on the hexie is from the laser used to cut the piece.  This should either A) be lost in your seam allowance or B) wash out.  Either way, while your piecing its a blessing as it stops the edges from stretching or fraying.


Last night I got as far as piecing five basic rows of 8 hexies each.  To this point it's been incredibly easy to chain piece them together, so this took very little time.  


I'm now starting to join the rows together into a top.  This is a bit more tricky as you have more "bulk" to work with, but the concept remains the same.  Using the little premarked dots, creating the Y-seams is very easy to do on your sewing machine.



The pieces hanging out over the edge of the top will be cut off of one side and added to the other to both increase the size of the quilt and reduce the amount of waste from the precut pack.  If I stick with just the hexies, the top will be relatively small.  I am thinking of adding on a border of Simply Style to bulk it up a bit, but now I am getting ahead of myself.  For now, I am just happy that this little experiment is going swimmingly.  As I grow in confidence I can indeed see how these little Honeycomb pre-cuts can be used in all sorts of projects like here and here.  Gorgeous!







15 comments:

Sophie Belle Designs said...

Great post Cindy. While I can paper piece them I have no idea of doing it by machine. Looks great

Melissa said...

They look great! This is my favorite line right now and I'm making 600+ 1" EPP hexies with them, I bet they go WAY faster with the machine :)

Anonymous said...

Can they be done by machine???
I noticed these honeycombs a while ago and they look very attractive... I have veeeery little experience with hexies and I think I should practice a bit more though.
Yours look fab :-)

Lucy | Charm About You said...

Your hexies look great! I will have to give the honeycombs a try some time! I'm left wondering where is step 3?!

Katy Cameron said...

Looking great so far! So have you worked out what step 3 should have been yet?

Isisjem said...

Great post. I'd seen the honeycombs advertised but it didn't occur to me you could use them for anything other than EPP. Silly me!

cheeky monkey said...

Well done! I can figure out how you did the rows but still thinking how to put the rows together and managing the fabrics. It looks great and brilliant idea about putting the half hexagons back on the other side.

Tomomi McElwee said...

Looks so professional.I have done only paper piecing hand stitching hexies.

Celtic Thistle said...

I have a couple of packs of Honeycombs gathering dust in my stash, will have to dust them down and do something with them now that you have shown me how straightforward it is!

Liz said...

Machine hexies?! Awesome :-). Now why didn't I think of that?

Vicki said...

Oh my, that sounds like a lot of work. I didn't realize that you could machine stitch hexies. Great post!

Leanne said...

I keep wanting to piece some hexies, I will put them on my list. There is a good tutorial here too: http://tallgrassprairiestudio.blogspot.ca/2012/02/sewing-hexagons-by-machine-without.html

Kris said...

Very cool. I have never tried machine piecing hexies before. I have done diamonds, so it's probably a little similar. The marking is a great idea. I just eyeballed everything with the diamonds which involved a lot of unpicking at first, but I eventually got my eye trained ;)

Laura said...

Very cute Cindy :)

Sarah @ FairyFace Designs said...

They're looking great. Sewcraftyjess had a tute on machine piecing hexies too but it looks like you have it well under control.

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