This work is based on Lucy Boston’s popular pattern The Patchwork the Crosses.
The block consists of hexagons. But not the regular hexagons normally used in patchwork. A regular hexagon has six sides of equal length and all the angles are 120°. The hexagons used in this block have equal length sides but one opposite pair of corners have a right angle (90°) and the other four corners are 135°.
The fabric used are all liberty lawn, many of which had been donated by friends.
Lucy Bostons design has a large border around the interesting part of the block. The central part has 24 hexagons compared with 24 hexagons plus 20 squares in the border. This was a bit daunting especially as the main colour would be black.
After some experimenting we realised that by removing the diamonds between the blocks and altering the corner stones more focus could be given to interesting part of the block. In this revised design, there 6 standard hexagon plus 4 smaller truncated hexagon in the border plus 4 shortened hexagons in the corner stones. The net result is a reduction in the number of patches in the border from 44 to 14 per block.
In the traditional block, the sides of the hexagons and squares are 1”. In the revised block 1¼” has been used to increase the area by over 50% and thus giving more scope when fussy cutting the fabrics.
