Sewing some rosettes together

I follow Wheels on the Warrandyte Bus by Carole. Carole does beautiful applique work; one of her current projects is the Antique Wedding Sampler (AWS) quilt and I am enjoying watching her progress. She has also been making my 2014 Hexagon Quilt Along Pattern, Value Proposition.  However my main reason for mentioning Carole's blog is hexagons. If you love hexagons you must see Carole's April 3rd post. She visited the Quilts in the Barn Show and she posted oodles of pictures of hexagon quilts by Marg Sampson-George and her students. The motifs in this quilt have me drooling! While you are at Carole's blog be sure to check out her AWS blocks!

There's more progress on my Birds in the Loft hexagon quilt. To start I made a few more hexagon rosettes and these ones are fussy cut!

I've still got more rosettes to stitch but there are enough for me to start thinking about putting them together. The rosettes have been made in pairs and there are 100 pairs. I've already used 10 pairs around the medallion so there will be 90 pairs to stitch together for the background.

The first step is to divide the rosette pairs into two piles. I put one pile in a zip lock bag and label it "Lower Half of Quilt". The remaining rosettes will form the upper half of the quilt. In the following diagram you can see that the rosettes in the upper half are numbered 1 to 100 from left to right. The same numbers are repeated in the bottom half starting in the lower right corner to the lower left corner.

I arranged the hexagons that I've made in rows. There are 13 in the first row, 12 in the second, 13 in the third and so on. When I am happy with the arrangement of hexagons I write the number on the paper on the wrong side of the rosette.

The quilt will be constructed in sections to make it manageable. To do this I'll take the rosettes from the first row and I'll pin together rosettes 1 to 6. Rosettes 7 to 13 will also be pinned together. Each subsequent row will be sorted, numbered and pinned in the same way.

The even numbered rows (the row that starts with rosettes 14, 39, 64, 82, 94 in the upper half and rosettes 97, 87, 73, 50, and 25) will need the filler pieces at the beginning and end of the row. These are the filler pieces I've been stitching.

The top and bottom edges of the quilt will be edged with the beige hexagons. It will create a visual separation between the body of the quilt and the border. I was itching to see how the rosettes will look when the are stitched together with the beige filler pieces and the edging at the top so I sewed together rosettes 1 to 6. The finishing touch was the toasty beige edging of hexagons on top and this is how it looks!

Now it is time for me to get back to stitching rosettes!

Until I post again, happy sewing!
Karen H