Hexagon Dreams and Reality

Center of a medallion from the Missouri Historical Society

You may recall I recently began piecing hexagons over paper to see what I could make with a Charm pack of my Morris Workshop collection.

I began dreaming of medallions of fussy cut pattern.

Detail from about 1875 from the collection of Terry Thompson

About 1935 by Albert Small

But reality struck.

You can't get too far on a Charm pack if you are piecing concentric rings and worrying about shading. The numbers increase at a Malthusian rate as you go out from the center. (Don't ask me what a Malthusian rate is.)

So does the lumpiness, but that will quilt out (I always assure myself.)
I realized I would have to square up the edges and call it a mini quilt.

That wasn't as easy as I dreamed either. Resolving the edges on these things can be challenging. A lot of people advised me to just applique it down onto another piece of fabric.
(In the center of another piece of fabric!)

Hexagon from about 1840 from Copake Auctions

I could have just given up on the concentric rings and gone for random as I ran out of fabric.

The pattern used to be called Job's Troubles and now you know why.

There are a lot of unfinished hexagon projects out there.

And a lot with some interesting solutions to the problem of turning a hexagon into a rectangle.

From about 1960 from Donna Stickovich's collection

About 1910 from Keepsake Cottage

About 1940 from Larry Schwarm's collection.

Apparently she just couldn't stop adding pieces.

Marcena McNabb, Oklahoma, about 1940.

Collection of Mary Ann Anders.

Right now I will be happy with my mini.

And thanks for all the suggestions about printing my own hexagons on freezer paper, on fabric or on the cards that fall out of magazines. However, I feel that one should never advise an obsessive that he or she should be saving the cards that fall out of magazines.

Albert Small after being advised to save cards that fall out of magazines.

The quilt behind him is the one pictured above.

I still like paying somebody to measure and cut the templates for me but if I ever have another hexagon dream I'll consider the suggestions.

Here's a pattern of sorts. The numbers are the number of hexagons you need for each ring. I guess you add 6 as you go out. For the corners I did you need 24 full hexagons and for the edges ten each of hexagons cut across one way and the other. Mine measures 15-1/4 x 17-1/2" with a 2-1/2" border.

Morris Workshop Colors

In The Morris Workshop reproduction collection I did for Moda we have six colorways. (Colorways is textile jargon for color palettes.) I gave each a name derived from Morris workshop history. While Fennel Green and Indigo (above) recall colors, the other names come from Morris places and people.

The tan is Hammersmith Tea, a reference to a London neighborhood on the north bank of the Thames that is now home to the William Morris Society and a name which the firm used for carpets. Merton Brown (above) is named for Merton Abbey in a village in Surrey, home to much of the design and textile production.

Red House Brick remembers the Red House in Upton, Bexleyheath, which Morris designed and lived in with his family.

Wardle's Sky Blue recalls Thomas Wardle who was a designer and dyer.

Britain's Textile Society is hosting a conference dedicated to the work of Thomas Wardle September 25-27 timed to coincide with the exhibition: Dye, Print, Stitch: Textiles by Thomas and Elizabeth Wardle at Macclesfield Silk Museum in Cheshire. Click here to read more about the conference:
http://www.textilesociety.org.uk/events/event-details.php?textile-event=102

The Morris prints are so great (No thanks to me---thank the Morris Workshop artists) that simple patchwork is quite effective. Here's one by Linda Frost just using the strips.

And Denniele Bohannon sent photos of a quilt made of triangles from the last Morris collection, A Morris Garden. She donated it to her church for a raffle. She writes:

"The Harrisonville (Missouri) United Methodist quilters did the quilting. I am one of them....learning from the best."

Pimpernel

This may be my favorite William Morris pattern, Pimpernel, ever since my sister wallpapered her stairway in it twenty years ago. I am luxuriating in having yards of reproduction fabric in three colorways from The Morris Workshop line.

"Pimpernel" is the name that the Morris workshop gave to their wallpaper in 1876. A pimpernel is a flower. Anagallis arvensis is an English plant that seems actually to be considered a weed. I always thought the flower in the wallpaper looked like a tulip since I had no idea what a pimpernel was. I did some quick and dirty research, brought up some pimpernel photographs on the web, and now I realize the pimpernels are the background flowers. Those are tulips with pimpernels creeping around behind them.

An English gardener has a blog with a photo that shows how they grow in the garden as they do in the Morris pattern.

http://oxfordgarden.blogspot.com/2008/07/elusive-scarlet-pimpernel.html

All I know about pimpernels is a melodramatic 1930s movie called The Scarlet Pimpernel, which used to be on Million Dollar Movies in the afternoon when I was in grade school. I see it was drawn from a play by Baroness Emmuska Orczy about the French revolution. The hero, sort of like Zorro, assumed a mysterious identity to aid the suffering.

The reason I bring this all up, aside from an enjoyment of the word pimpernel, is that I had intended in The Morris Workshop fabric to include the designer's name and the date and name of the design on the selvage of each piece, but we ran out of room. People might like that information so I made a PDF and linked it to my website. You can download a sheet with an index to each print. Click here to download that file.

http://www.barbarabrackman.com/Morrisworkshop.pdf

Stepping Stones Nine Patch

People are asking for suggestions as to what to do with The Morris Workshop fabric. One possibility that uses simple patchwork to show off complex prints is the "Stepping Stones" pattern Moda did for our first William Morris collection. That free pattern for A Morris Garden, is still posted on Moda's Free Patterns page. Click here:

http://www.unitednotions.com/fp_a-morris-garden.pdf

The quilt top on the left is done in the Morris Garden fabrics. I found it on Sadie Bird's blog, and the other is by Rebecca Rohrkaste, showing off large scale prints. The one below is a collaboration between Georgann Eglinski, Bobbi Finley and Carol Gilham Jones.

To see more antique versions of this basic nine-patch on point check out the Quilt Index on line. Click on these for an early quilt and two by Amish women in Illinois.

http://www.quiltindex.org/fulldisplay.php?pbd=MichiganMSUMuseum-a0b7o2-a
http://www.quiltindex.org/basicdisplay.php?pbd=IllinoisISM-a0a0f6-a
http://www.quiltindex.org/basicdisplay.php?pbd=IllinoisISM-a0a0p1-a

Game Board

One of my favorite possessions is an old checkerboard made of linoleum squares. I've looked at it every morning for twenty years and thought that would make a great quilt---just four-patches in different contrast pairs.

I finally made a little table topper out of quarter-yard cuts of greens and browns from The Morris Workshop collection. I put a free pattern for it on my webpage so click here to download it. It's towards the bottom right on the home page as "Game Board." http://www.barbarabrackman.com/

I thought I was pretty clever until I found this picture on eBay of what looks to be a double knit quilt top. Somebody else had the same idea!