Linen love affair and hexie tutorial

It doesn’t take much to make me happy, just a new piece of fabric and my smile appears!

This week I was pottering about in my local fabric shop and I spied a bolt of beautiful linen, to be fair I’ve seen this bolt (or one just like it!) there before but that was the day I decided to spend my pennies on actually buying some. I love the feel and look of linen, there’s something quite beautiful about its slight roughness and the natural colour blends so well with, well, anything really.

But what to make? Then I saw this facebook post by Sewing Room Secrets and I loved it!

This type of hexagon arrangement is called a  twisted hexagon and I came across them a while ago, here’s one I used to make a pincushion,

These twisted hexagons can be made using the English paper piecing method or by good old sewing machine method.

I used EPP for my pincushion (good tutorial here at Quilt Obsession), so I thought I’d use my sewing machine this time.

My first step was to make the pattern, I usually make my own patterns and thought I’d do a tutorial on how to draft one so you can make a twisted hexie too but in whatever size you want! Sorry if this is a bit like teaching grannies to suck eggs (apologies to all lovely grannies out there!) but it seemed like a good idea at the time 🙂

Twisted Hexagon Template Tutorial

First step is to work out how big you want your finished twisted hexagon to be (I do this in inches), note down the diameter and then half it. So if I want a twisted hexagon to be around 6 inches in diameter, I’m halving it to be 3 at this point.

Then add on seam allowances of 1/2 inch (so I’ve now got 3 1/2 inches)

Half this – 1 and 3/4 inches. This measurement is the radius of a circle you need to now draw on some card (I used an old cereal packet).

Make a small mark on the circumference of the circle and put the point of your compass on it – make sure you do not alter the distance between the arms of the compass.

Mark the circumference again where the compass pencil crosses the line.

Move the compass point onto the new mark and repeat the mark making process.

Repeat again

and again until the compass pencil makes a mark on top of the original mark. (If this does not happen it means that the compass arms moved either closer together or further apart – try again until the marks match up)

You will hopefully be left with a circle and 6 marks, like this…

Join up the marks to make a super accurate hexagon, this is your pattern piece.

Cut it out carefully – don’t want to mess up all our hard work here 😉

Draw round your hexagon and draw a straight line across the hexagon from one point to another.

Cut these out carefully too – these will be templates for the ‘twisted’ bits of the hexagon.

You should now have these pieces…

which you can see can be arranged like this!

All the pieces have a 1/4 inch seam allowance included.

You are now the proud owner of templates for a twisted hexagon in the size you want, all you have to do now cut out the fabric (6 half hexagons for every whole hexagon!) and decide what to make 🙂

Now onto the exciting part – the sewing 🙂

Until next time,

Chris x

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