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!