The Quilt that Every Man and His Dog Had a Hand In

Once upon a time, (in 2011 to be precise) I fell in love with the idea of making a hand sewn hexagon quilt. I must have been temporarily insane at the time because I'd never hand sewn a whole quilt in my life....

I consulted everyone I know about paper piecing and debated the merits of  glue basting or thread basting and read so many tutorials on the subject that I almost went blind.

I finally screwed up the courage to make a start in October 2011, when I went to visit Little Miss Sunshine for the very first time.  Her daughter, BP was pressed into service and admirably basted about 170 hexies for me (without complaint might I add !) and the hand sewing began. 

And went on and on and on ....forever.

Somewhere in there I decided that I was going to applique the individual hexagon "flowers" to backing blocks because I knew if I tried to hand sew an entire quilt of hexagons I'd still be doing it in the retirement village, or handing it down to Little P to finish as an ancestral WIP.

When it came time to take the hexagons out of their basting papers, I realised that I'm a classic over gluer. I pretty much needed a crow bar to pry those things out. The Not The Farmers Wife sewing group girls took pity on me and helped me take all the papers out one day, while making rude comments about how much glue I'd used.  Suckers...I had the last laugh because I didn't have to tackle that little job all on my lonesome.

I was all for machine sewing those suckers onto the backing blocks but a couple of my "friends" (I'm looking at you Val and Tara ) made "that's the most stupid idea ever" faces when I mentioned it so I bowed to peer pressure and started hand appliqueing them onto the backing blocks. I've never hand appliqued anything in my life so Val taught me how to do that after I made it look incredibly difficult one day at another one of our sewing days. I think the phrase she used was "Do you want me to show you how to do that an easier way" which roughly translates to "I cant stand to see you doing that completely wrong you idiot".  After my success in suckering them all in to taking out the backing papers I was kind of hoping if I made the applique part of the process look hard that they'd all take pity on me and do a few each but alas that was not to be. I think they'd gotten wise to me by that stage.

So hand applique I did - and that went on and on and on- forever. 

I finally finished (amid loud vows to never listen to well meaning "you must hand applique" friends again) and ignored it for a couple more months then screwed up the internal fortitude to sew the whole hot mess together into a top. 

By that stage I was really liking it again and since I was shit scared if I quilted it I'd do something to completely wreck it I prevailed on Val to quilt it for me with the brief to do whatever she wanted.  And I'm oh so glad I did ...

Look at this utter feast for the eyes ....

Variegated dragonflies - adorable!

The back 

In all her glory on my king sized bed. 

I'm thrilled with how it looks so thank you to everyone who helped, cajoled and threatened me into this finish but a special thanks to Val who really made this quilt come alive. 

This is my first finish for the 2nd quarter of Katy's FAL 

 and I'm also linking to Elizabeth's finishes linky party for May

Now I just need to get that Dresden finished since there was the small matter of the threat of a nudey run down our main shopping precinct if it was still lurking by the end of June...

You can see my original FAL goal list for the quarter here