Adventures in Hexagons Blog Tour Kickoff!

Hello, and welcome to the  Adventures in Hexagons blog tour! I'm Emily Breclaw, and I'm so excited to be sharing the adventure with you this week. Check out our line-up of lovely bloggers at the end of this post. You'll find quilters with pro-hexagon tips to share, businesses with my absolute favorite tools and supplies for sewing hexagons, and even fabulous quilters who are trying out hexies for the very first time! It will be a week full of fun people, terrific giveaways, and of course, hexies of all shapes and sizes.

Today, I wanted to share with you the origin story for the Adventures in Hexagons book concept. Back in 2011, I had just started my blog and pattern design business, The Caffeinated Quilter. I stumbled upon images of a quilt called Candied Hexagons by Kerry Dear that had been published in an Australian quilt magazine. I couldn't track down a copy of the pattern, but I spent many happy hours looking at Google images of gorgeous quilts made by other quilters.

A couple months later, we celebrated with a dear friend of the family when her son married a wonderfully creative lady. Their outdoor wedding featured tons of handmade bunting. They made the bunting from a vintage tablecloth that had belonged to the bride's grandmother. It was red, yellow, and blue, and included delightful farming scenes. She used numerous other vintage tablecloths and embroidered handkerchiefs to coordinate. She wore a beautiful lemon-yellow wedding dress.

How does this relate to Adventures in Hexagons? Well, I volunteered to make the newlyweds a quilt from all the fabrics used in the wedding (including her dress!), and you guessed it, I used the Candied Hexagons concept as a springboard for designing the quilt.

You can look on my website, www.thecaffeinatedquilter.com, for progress shots of the quilt under the category Candied Hexagons. As the quilt evolved, I began playing with designs. I realized you could make "blocks" larger than a standard hexagon size, so long as the outer edges of the block matched the one-patch quilt layout. As I blogged about the quilt progress, people started asking if I would publish a pattern for it. I kept thinking it was too much work for a pattern, that it would be more like a book. . .

And six years later, here we are. The newlyweds loved their quilt. I drafted diagrams and detailed instructions for most of the blocks in the quilt, set them in their own unique patterns, and Adventures in Hexagons was born. The final quilt in the book, Superstar, is a tribute to that wedding quilt. Instead of tablecloths, I featured vintage Japanese yukata (kimono) fabrics. It's one of my favorite quilts in the whole book.

Can you pick out some of the similar blocks?

I love the cheerful blue and yellow block here. Strangely enough, that one didn't make it into the book. BUT, if you follow the tour closely, you may see that block again. (HINT: it's now a free pattern, and I'll tell you how to get it on the last day of the tour!)

So now you know how the Adventure started. Please join me and the bloggers below for a fun-filled week of Adventures in Hexagons, and be sure to tag your creations from the book with #adventuresinhexagons so we can all see the wonderful possibilities!

July 24- C&T Publishing www.ctpub.com

July 25- Generation Q Magazine http://generationqmagazine.com/

July 27- Marti Michell https://www.frommarti.com/

July 28-Clothworks Fabrics www.clothworks.com

July 29- Cathi Godwin, https://quiltobsession.blog/

July 30- Paper Pieces , www.paperpieces.com

August 1- Mary Huey, http://maryhueyquilts.blogspot.com/

August 4- Cheryl Sleboda, www.Muppin.com

August 5- Wendy Sheppard,  https://ivoryspring.wordpress.com/

August 6- Emily Breclaw,  www.thecaffeinatedquilter.com

P.S. Here at C&T, we're giving away a copy of Adventures in Hexagons to celebrate Emily's blog tour! You can enter to win here: a Rafflecopter giveaway. US winners will receive a hard copy, international winners will receive an ebook.

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