Bitten by the Hexie Bug

I like so many other innocent quilters have been bitten by the hexie bug. I know I'm not alone...I've seen others...there's an outbreak on Instagram and Pinterest. We can't help ourselves. The darned things are fun to work on and they're easily transportable.

 
For me it started with an innocent glance and then a continuous stare at Millefiori quilts. The color and movement was absolutely breathtaking. This led to  Hatja Marek's book, The New Hexagon. Her hexies are not your ordinary English paper pieced hexagon; oh, no, they're so much more than that. They're multi-faceted and extremely interesting.

This is the point where the fever set in. I pulled my favorite colors from my stash, bought the paper patterns and started working. And work I did - I was a person obsessed. Every evening when I got home from work, I couldn't wait to start putting the little puzzle pieces together. 

"Rosette 1" was my goal and I got it done fairly quickly. But what to do with it? It's approximately 36" high and 36" wide. I'd like a wall hanging, so what I need to do is applique the piece onto another fabric. I so don't want to do that. I'm afraid it'll wiggle and shift as I try to applique around the circumference. 

 

That's when I remembered another technique I learned years ago for applique.It's from Mastering Machine Applique - Mock Hand Applique and Other Techniques by Harriet Hargrave. Basically what you do is a blind stitch around the piece to be appliqued. On my Bernina, I used  a stitch width of .75, shortened the stitch length, loosened the tension, used monofiliment thread, and a fine thread in the bobbin. It worked like a charm. 

Here's the back and you can barely see the stitches by my well-manicured finger nail.

  
Next step will be to quilt it. I think I'm going to quilt a hexagon shape in the blank space around the piece, but still not so sure about how to quilt the rosette. I think I'll take the Scarlett O'Hara approach "I'll think about that tomorrow"!