Flowers from Scraps

Reminiscent of Grandmother's Flower Garden, the traditional hexagon quilt, I decided to group these hundreds of padded hexagons into flowers to make some kind of orderly sense out of every fabric you can imagine.

I mentioned that all (most of) the backs of the hexagons are a tone-on-tone or solid-like fabric. So I grouped the hexagons into sets of seven to make flowers. I arrange the prints in a satisfying arrangement and then turn them over to the backs to make sure the back looks good too (and tried to avoid two pieces of the same fabric being right next to each other).

With the English Paper Piecing hexagons, I just used a whip stitch to put them together. I tried that with these. I did not like the look of the whip stitch - as it will be exposed on the back of the quilt. So I chose to use a hidden hem stitch much like what I use when I stitched the frame around the hexagon. This is the same stitch I use when I hand bind a quilt. I go through the fold of the top hexagon and out about a scant 1.4" later, grabbing a couple threads from the lower hexagon. Then stitch into the fold of the top hexagon right where the needle came out of the bottom hexagon. That way just a little, tiny stitch shows Maybe you can see it in this picture:

Cathy H