California Poppies! Quilt

Remember these little orange and yellow hexies I told you about previously? They were for a quilt for my guild's annual challenge show. This year's theme was West Coast Splendor. The challenge was to choose something we love about living on the coast, and represent that with fabric. The show will be at Gualala Arts Center from April 6 through April 29. Now I'll show you how I got from a pile of hexies to a finished wall hanging.

I made 94 small 1 1/4" hexagons. A lot of these were sewn in the car on our trip down to Phoenix. The next photo shows how I laid all the hexagons out on the desk in our hotel room to get the arrangement just right. After I was pleased with the arrangement, I turned each hexie over and wrote a row and column number on the paper. That way I knew I could keep them in

the correct order.

By keeping these small pieces in order via hotel stationary envelopes, I got all 94 of them hand pieced together.

That job done, my next step was to buy some backing fabric. I thought about going with a green, but Melody at Britex Fabrics helped me to look at a lot of different fabrics. A green background actually made the few green hexagons really stand out, and that drew in the eye too much. So we found a nice batik that blended well with my other colors.

I pinned the hexagon grouping to the batik, then appliquéd it down all around the edges. That done, the next step was to cut away the batik that was directly behind the hexagons. Which is what I'm doing in the next photo.

That was actually a little nerve-wracking, as I had to be very careful not to make a snip into the hexagons. But I wanted to trim very close to the edges of the hexies.

Now we come to the sandwiching part. I have this nice little bandaid box, courtesy of one of my dear friends, in which I keep some of my safety pins. So, out they came and I got the quilt sandwiched. This one is not very big, about 24" by 26", just slightly longer than it is wide.

I chose to do some straight-line quilting, following the lines of the hexagons. This made a large pattern of X's all over the quilt. You can see it in the photo below.

And here is the final product. I've named it "California Poppies!," with an exclamation point at the end.

Did I mention that I really love California poppies? Their bright yellow and orange colors, the fact that they are a nice sign of spring, seeing them growing beside the highways here in northern California, just their brightness! Can a flower really be optimistic?!? That's how I feel about poppies.