Hexagon inspiration at the York Heritage Quilt Show

I went to the York Heritage Quilt Show. York Heritage is a large guild so there were many truly amazing quilts to be seen. Unfortunately there was no program and I missed having it for note taking. The venue was lovely but the space was tight in the main exhibit hall and the lighting was not very good for picture taking but I managed to takes some pix of hexagon quilts, two traditional and a the third a little less so!

This is the first traditional hexagon quilt titled Swedish Immersion . The quilt was made with lovely small prints, most of which were fussy cut! I believe these were 3/4" hexagons. The white border fabric was a shirting type print.

Here are a couple of close-ups of the lovely little hexagons.

The maker quilted inside each background hexagon and also the middle hexagon but the circle of print hexagons was left unquilted and the effect was quilt nice.

The dark border was very interesting and it created a lovely inner frame for the delicate little blocks. It reminds me of dental molding and it is so simple to do; the quilt is appliqued to the dark fabric so that the quilt has straight edges that allow one to add more borders to frame the quilt. I wrote a tutorial showing how I do this with my quilts. You will find the tutorial here.

The second traditional quilt was an Irish chain with hexagons, hence the title Irish Flower Garden! Each of the hexagons flowers was fussy cut from floral fabrics to create some new fabulous flowers.

Look at these pretty "made" flowers! I've said more than once that if you want to make a hexagon quilt but don't have the patience to made a quilt top entirely of hexagons just make the rosettes and applique them to background squares. If you add them to a pieced quilt top it makes for an even more interesting quilt!

It this picture you can see the block with the hexagon rosette appliqued in the centre,

This quilt was hand quilted. When I go to shows I see less and less hand quilting so this was something of a treat!

The third quilt is a little less traditional in its construction and it is in fact a triptych of small hexagon quilts. A triptych is a piece of artwork that is divided into three sections. I found this hexagon triptych interesting because the hexagons were stitched together rather informally and the some were appliqued on top of others giving the small quilts a rather higgledy piggledy look! All three quilts were embellished with hand embroidery and hand quilting.

The quilt on the far left is titled Hexie I. There are areas where bits of red seem to frame the hexagons and this is in fact embroidery!

The quilt in the middle is titled Hexie Blue.

The quilt on the far right is titled Hexie II. If you look closely at this quilt you can see areas where the hexagons are layered on top of others. Even when they are cropped the quilt still reads as a hexagon quilt!

The embroidery appears to have been done with pearl cotton.

Just love the spiderweb effect of the embroidery around the edges of the hexagons!

I wish I had more quilt pictures to share but as I say the lighting was not very good so I'm afraid that's about it! I hope you feel inspired to go create something wonderful today - I know I do!

Until I post again, happy sewing!

Karen H