When I made "Miracles Happen" a couple of weeks ago, the fabric I used for the bird applique was from a 5 inch "Petit Fleur" charm square and quite honestly I fell in love with it.
But alas, I only had one 5 inch square in that print so I wanted to use every little piece wisely and to its best and most beautiful advantage.
Looks lovely as the wing and breast doesn't it...
Yesterday Mr E began a week's holiday and we are making time each day to do something together. After an excursion in the morning hubby settled in for a long afternoon nap, so I thought I'd sketch an idea for using another corner of that little charm square remnant.
And this is what I came up with...
I'm sharing this little design as a free gift today because it's a quick project and is great for practicing embroidery on single paper pieced hexies.
It's important that you make your hexie first and blind stitch it onto the fabric you'll be using to embroider on.
Here's a quick tutorial I shared recently for making a single hexie (during the Hussif Tutorial)...
Trace a line a little less than 1/4" outside the edge of the hexie shape. Cut away your fabric along that line.
Fold the fabric over the paper hexie one section at a time and tack the fabric and paper together with thread.
Press gently around the edges with a warm dry iron to form a permanent crease. Wait until the fabric is cold then remove the stitches and the paper from the hexie and give it one more firm press with your iron around all sides.
NOTE: If you do not have a one inch hexie paper simply trace the hexie shape from the design on your pattern sheet onto a piece of paper. Cut it out on the traced lines and use it as I've shown above.
Tracing the design...
Place the hexie embellished fabric over the pattern sheet and trace the stitchery design without the flower petals. Just add tiny dots slightly away from the centre circle...
Don't forget to trace one daisy onto your hexie...
Backstitch the words, and sew cross-stitches where indicated, using two strands of thread.
Satin stitch the centre of the daisies with two strands of thread.
Sew lazy daisy petals using three strands of thread. The larger the petals the more threads I like to use as they seem to 'fill' out the shape and create impact when you're stitching with threads similar in colour to your background fabric.
Just inside the edge of your hexie sew a line of running stitch with two strands of thread...
And that's "The Hexie Flower Show"!
I've no idea how you'll display your completed stitchery but mine became the cover of a needle-book (I have a serious addiction to needle-books this year)...
And can you see that I still have about a third of my original 5 inch charm square left?
Never under-estimate the value of a pretty charm square and how many projects it can bring to life!
Want to see inside my new needle-book?
I chose a 10 inch layer cake square for the inside fabric, then added folded charm squares from Petit Fleur as the pockets.
I hid the raw inside edges of the pockets with cotton lace...
...and added a scrap of cotton quilt wadding for my needles and pins.
The binding across the top and bottom is the leftover piece of layer cake that I'd used for the inside, and as I had no more left for the sides I used cotton lace instead.
Using small pieces of fabric to create a new project is a lot of fun but I think we tend to forget that sometimes and look instead at our larger pieces like yardage or fat quarters for inspiration.
I don't use large quantities of fabric in my designs unless it's a quilt, and I only make a handful of them each year, so I've come to love charm square packs, sushi rolls and origami squares (or maybe you know them by other names such as layer cakes and jelly rolls) because I can buy the full fabric range from any designer I like in 'small pieces' and use them to miniature advantage. Gosh, it's fun!
What about you? Do you normally purchase small cuts, fat quarters or yardage?
My free "The Hexie Flower Show" pattern can be downloaded
HERE
Enjoy!
