Hive 6 January Tutorial

Happy new year, everyone! I hope you are all ready for a year full of quilty awesomeness! I'm Sylvia, and I'm the mama for Hive 6. This is my third year in the bee.

With my first year's
Stash Bee quilt!

1. Name:  Sylvia

2. Where you live: Athens, Georgia

3. Tell us about your family: Just me and my husband. We have been married for almost four years.

4. Tell us about your pets: One crazy (and crazy cute) cockatiel named Pizzicato. I've had parrots all my life, which is why I called my blog "Flying Parrot Quilts." :)

5. How long have you been quilting? Going on 9 years now!

6. What crafts do you do other than quilting? I want to do AAAAAAAALL of them! I occasionally knit/crochet, although I try to limit myself to buying only yarn for specific projects since otherwise I can't figure out what to do with it. My husband gave me a Silhouette electronic cutting machine for my birthday last year (he's a very good husband), so I've been playing around with that a lot lately, and it's reignited my interest in paper crafts, which I abandoned for fabric when I discovered quilting.

7. Fabric line you want to buy next: I'm so excited about the jellyfish prints in Patty Sloniger's Into The Deep, because my background is in marine science. 

8. Preferred quilting method (FMQ, long arm, hand, etc.): Free motion seems to be what I'm best at. I just turned a show quilt into a non-show quilt using my walking foot, so I am disgruntled with straight line quilting right now. :) I am really, really wanting to get a longarm sometime soon, but I'm having a hard time figuring out whether or not I can realistically fit it anywhere.

9. Where we can find you on social media: Blog: www.flyingparrotquilts.com, Instagram: @flyingparrotquilts, Pinterest: flutefish

10. Favorite book: I never get tired of rereading Harry Potter, even though I was in college when I read the first one. If we're talking grown-up books, I love Katherine by Anya Seton.

11. Favorite show to binge watch: Star Trek (TNG) and The Big Bang Theory. It's too early in the run to binge-watch, but we are loving The Expanse on SyFy so far.

Okay, on to the block! 

I fell in love with this quilt from the Victoria and Albert Museum collection the first time I saw a picture (because the stupid quilt gallery was being redone when I actually WENT to the museum so I couldn't see the actual quilt, which was TRAGIC) and I'd like to recreate something similar, since my husband is a Brit and while I have a Stash Bee Couch Cuddle Quilt he does not. :) Fortunately, the fabulous Molli Sparkles has an equally fabulous tutorial on making anatomically correct Union Jack blocks, and they're a lot faster than they sound--each one only took me about an hour.

For the colors for each block, please choose either two similar colors or two adjacent colors on the color wheel (e.g. red and orange, blue and purple; please no browns/black/gray as the main color). Here are a few pairs that would work well together: 

The top row has similar color fabrics, the bottom has adjacent colors. Please stick to fabrics that read as primarily one color, and you'll probably want to use something with a reasonably small-scale print. (You can squint or wave them in front of you really fast so they're a blur if you're unsure what color a fabric reads as.) I normally like batiks, but I'd rather stick to prints for this particular quilt. If you have any science-y, ocean-y, or text fabrics that you feel like using, he always likes those sorts of prints, but that's entirely optional; please don't feel like you have to use anything like that.

You will also need a white; either a solid or a white-on-white print works.

Molli's tutorial is very detailed, so I don't have much to add, but here are just a couple of things that I thought I'd mention. First, please pay close attention to how the quadrant (diagonal stripe) units are trimmed and then sewn together. If you line up your ruler with the wrong corner it will make the flag anatomically incorrect, and with this quilt going to someone with intimate knowledge of the British flag I'm hoping to avoid that. ;)

Now that I freaked you out over the trimming of the diagonal stripes (don't be, it's OK if it ends up being off--I plan on a lot of blocks so he'll probably never notice ;)  )--when you do trim, it comes out a little differently from the diagram, so don't worry that you did something wrong, particularly for the quadrant 2 units. This was how my quadrant 2 looked when trimmed:, but it's correct when sewn together.

Molli mentions piecing 32" strips and then sub-cutting into 4 8" units. If you're using a fat quarter you can cut 2 16" strips instead. You can also do the sub-cutting thing for the left and right stripes of the cross by cutting 1 14.5" strip in place of 2 7.25" strips.

Since the strips, particularly in the quadrants, are fairly narrow, I found it worked best if I sewed as much as I could before pressing. So I sewed the whole WRW quadrant unit before pressing. 

I got no distortion of the strips this way, which is normally a problem for me.

Here are what my finished blocks looked like. Thank you so much; I can't wait to see what fabulousness you come up with!