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Layens Hives

I just wrote that title so I'd sound smart; it has approximately zero to do with this project. You should probably brace yourself for an awful lot of bee-related puns, though. I won't be able to resist. (Also, Layens hives are horizontal and allow frames to be tightly packed together and frankly it's a very accurate metaphor for what I'm doing with my pieces.)

A closeup of a white paper hexagon with sparse text; "oncology" is the only legible word. A pale pink measureing tape is laid across the lower half of the hexagon, showing that it's 2.25 inches across, with a quarter-inch border marked all the way around.
I eyeballed that. If you follow my Instagram (@sabinebattante), you know this already. I'm very proud of it.
Step one for fabric pieces was to create a new template with quarter-inch seam allowances (which are tiny, holy carp), which I did with a pen, a scrap of a flyer, and one of the punched paper templates I'm using for the actual basting.

Yellow fabric rolled around a cardboard mailing tube just slightly longer than the fabric is wide, placed on a medium-brown wood table next to a paper template of nine hexagons in a row, connected by their short, vertical sides.
We go high-tech here at chez d'Acre.
Since I'd gone to all the trouble of ironing my fabrics beforehand, I picked a few to roll around an old mailing tube (I'm not a packrat, I'm prepared) and bring to work, where there are continuous flat surfaces larger than a fat quarter. I also transformed my single hexagon into a little paper chain to make tracing the pieces take slightly less of forever to accomplish.

A fat quarter of yellow fabric with faint white dots and dashes, laid out wrong-side-up on a medium-brown wood table, with a white paper template of nine hexagons in a row placed so the hexagon points just touch the bottom edge of the fabric. A white stuffed sheep with a black face looks on from the upper left corner of the fabric.
Sheepy overlord is watching closely.
AND. Look how perfectly my little hexagons fit! Look at them! I didn't even plan that! I hoped for it, but I 100% did not even think to do the math to figure out what size hexagon would make most efficient use of my fabric, and lo, I hit on pretty much exactly that.

A fat quarter of yellow fabric with faint white dots and dashes, laid out wrong-side-up on a medium-brown wood table, with faint pencil lines marking zigzags that describe rows of hexagons over the whole piece. A white paper template of nine hexagons in a row is just above the top edge of the fabric. A white stuffed sheep with a black face looks on from the upper left corner of the fabric.
Pencil for marking, because neither of my fabric pens is working and that ink fades very quickly.
So. I can fit eight rows of nine hexagons each onto my fabric (counting the half-hexis on the offset rows, which I am, because they have enough extra to be pieced), plus one row of partial hexis to piece into 4.5 more. I'm calling it 72 hexagons per fat quarter, which is 144 of each print.

I have 30 fat quarters, plus four colors of silk (brown, cream, blue, and saffron) and a plain mustardy cotton—at a guess, I'm looking at about 2,500 one-inch hexagons. Which only makes up a roughly 3x5-foot quilt top. I'm not a tall person by any means, but at least half the point of this quilt is to be able to envelop myself in it and be snug as a bug in a rug. Which I cannot do with a lap quilt. So I'm probably looking at doubling (or...slightly more than doubling) the amount of fabric I'm using.

A closeup of bright sunflower yellow fabric with a serged seam, half unpicked.
I also complained about serged seams on Instagram.
No more shirt deconstruction, though. For a project like this, it doesn't generate enough fabric to be worth the time investment, especially when the seams are all serged or double-folded.

A closeup of the edge of a wrong-side-up yellow fabric with white, pale-pink, and black graphic leaf print. Tesselated hexagons are marked in dark pencil lines over the entire pieces of fabric, and one point-to-point half hexagon at the edge has been cut free and set slightly removed from its original place.
The First Snip of Christmas! Or something like that, anyhow.
I used an old insurance card I had kicking around in my sewing bag to mark the divisions between hexagons—just connect all the zigzags where they point toward each other, and voila! Hexagons!

Tessellation does mean that cutting out the hexagons is more fiddly than it might be—there are dozens of tutorials out there on cutting hexagons quickly with a rotary cutter, but that creates a lot more waste than I wanted to have. I'm already losing significant amounts of fabric to seam allowances, because I wanted to make very very tiny pieces, so every scrap I can save helps. And it was a good excuse to buy another pair of Gingher scissors, because I love my dressmakers shears, but they're way too heavy for this project.

A piece of yellow fabric, wrong-side-up, with a white, pale pink, and black graphic leaf print and edges cut along the outlines of the tesselated hexagons marked over the entire surface, on a dark wood table. A green and turquoise print zippered pouch, small stack of point-to-point half hexagons, and small silver scissors are just visible at upper left.
Edges trimmed!
I didn't really have a plan when I started cutting, but it seemed like removing all the partial hexagons from the edges would be a good first step. So I did that.

Four small stacks of yellow print fabric, arranged in a squashed diamond. Two stacks are half-hexagons, some point-to-point and some side-to-side; another stack is narrow cut-off points, and the last is random small shapes.
Various potentially-usable pieces.
No, I can't bear to throw them away yet. Even the ones that're definitely too small to piece together for one more hexagon.

A closeup of a marigold fabric hexagon with a six-leaved branch printed in black, nearly filling the shape, placed on the wrong side of more yellow print fabric marked with tesselated hexagons. A pair of small, silver scissors rest to the left of the hexagon.
SO PERFECT. I think that's my favorite hexi. Don't tell the other 143.
The next thing I figured out was that if I cut the verticals first, that makes enough ease to cut the angled sides away from the main fabric more easily. Angled sides and then horizontals works, but is more difficult to do accurately. And the wee scissors have very much improved the situation. The blades are the right length for the cuts I'm making, and they weigh almost nothing compared to my heavy shears.

A tall stack of yellow print fabric hexagons, held by a white hand and seen from the side, against a blue denim background.
You'll all know when I switch to summer skirts, because the background of my photos will change color.
And here's two fat quarters' worth of little bitty hexagons, ready to start basting onto templates. That wasn't so bad. Only...uh...6,768 hexagons to go.

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