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Sunday, January 26, 2014

Hexagon Centre Embroidery - Stars

One of the attractions to the hexagon quilt was the possibility of embroidering the centre of some of the 'flowers' using Mary Corbett's notion of stitch fun. I enjoyed playing with these stitches in the denim bags and thought it would be fun to play in a similar way with the quilt.

I decided to embroider a simple motif on any coloured 'flower' that had a plain fabric hexagon in the centre. I used the stitches I had already practised on the denim bags and added a few.



Hexagons really lend themselves to this treatment because of their shape. Whereas Mary Corbet begins many of her stitches by marking out dots in a circle, the hexagon provides six points to use without needing to mark the fabric. This was particularly so with star stitch, which I hadn't tried before.



 As you can see, I got right into the stars. They reminded me of a mathematics teacher I had in high school, who, at the end of one year taught us to do 'mathematical sewing' using a needle and thread and card. We marked holes along axes on the cards and then stitched from one axis to another, the threads forming webs and resulting in parabola and other shapes.

This felt very similar.

Much of this fabric is from dresses I  made for  my daughters or grand-daughters.

















The stars and checks are from a piece of Christmas fabric and the red carnations fabric came as part of a 2013 Christmas gift - in the wrapping for one of Hagar Arnon Elbaz's fabulous necklaces.












I am pleased with progress on the embroidery - I have embroidered different things on other centres - some examples coming soon.


6 comments:

margaret said...

these look great and what a good Maths teacher, he must have made your maths lessons much more fun and so you then learn far more too

Jillian said...

Thanks Margaret. The Matgs teacher was a woman and she was terrific- my favourite teacher and I did really well at Maths because of her.

Monica said...

One of the most fun things about quilting is the chance to remember where all the different fabrics came from. I see you are well into that too!

I love all the stars! I admired them on Mary's site. I don't know where I would use them, but I may try a couple anyway. It's going to be a gorgeous quilt, Jillian!

Katherine said...

They look fantastic and make it such a special hexagon quilt.

Jillian said...

Thanks Monica and Katherine. The stars age great fun to stitch and good value for effort.

JennyPennyPoppy said...

All of your stars look really nicely done Jillian. I have yet to try this stitch.