Doin' the Y-seam dance

A few weeks ago I started piecing together my hexi-in-a-hexi bee blocks. Thank goodness I made up my design wall panels a few months ago - they made this process to much easier. My entire layout doesn't fit on my design wall, so I decided to piece diagonal rows. This means that I can piece at least half of the blocks without worrying about the bottom of the quilt.

I find the process a little tedious, but it's not the Y-seams that are the problem; it's the marking of little dots on each of the 6 corners that I hate. And the backstitching on every seam when I'm used to chain piecing everything. A bonus is the new Juki machine that I am using has a cutter function on the foot pedal - it cuts both the top and bobbin threads so that I don't have to have scissors in hand and I don't have to worry about thread tails. A most handy feature. I figure this has made up for the time spent backstitching.

Still, the rows are going together pretty well and I'm half-way through piecing my flimsy. The finished quilt should be about 60 x 70 inches - I did make some calculations to verify that it would be big enough with the blocks and solid yardage that I had, but have since misplaced them. Never mind, I know how many blocks I need and that's all that matters now.

Because of the size I've pulled down the finished (almost) half and have flipped the design over and placed the blocks for the other half. I have not started piecing these, but will start soon (I hope).

I have not thought about how I will quilt this one. I have 2 quilts in the queue before I can do this one because I want to use my Swiftquilter. The first in queue is my second plaid quilt (Block Lotto) - it will be my first 'real' quilt to do on the Swiftquilter and may be slightly sacrificial. Quilt number 2 in queue is my small grey one. I hope to get through the plaid one this weekend (fingers crossed).