Coral Sea Hexagons

Another great-niece was born this past week, our second girl this year. I'm grateful for every opportunity to make a girl quilt because, in case you didn't know, we're expecting our fourth grandson this coming January! I'm plenty practiced at making boy quilts.

Knowing our great niece's room would be done in an ocean theme, in coral and aqua, I bought a few pieces of Michael Miller's By the Sea with the rest from my stash cupboard. A flamingo print keeps showing up in a bunch of my quilty projects! 

Baby Reese's quilt has been finished for several weeks, just waiting for a label. Until then, it was the quilt I used for several demonstrations: how to sew binding to a quilt, for a First Time Quiltmaking class; suggested free motion quilting designs, for a Free Motion Quilting workshop; and how to sew hexagons, a program for members of our Central Florida MQG. Now it's a gift! I guess I got a lot of mileage from it.

If you find yourself wanting to make an all-hexagons quilt, be sure to look up Kati's great "How to Piece Hexagons tutorials" (parts 1 and 2) on her blog: FromtheBlueChair. It's the method I used, and it saved me lots of time that I would have spent marking each piece with quarter-inch-from-the-edge dots.

The quilt back is a pretty piece of ombre. I split the piece down the middle and added a coral-colored print.

Instead of quilting with an all over design, I divided the quilt into tri-sections and quilted something a little different in each. Since I couldn't bear to quilt over the flamingos, I quilted around them.

Linda