Hexi's without Templates

Hello everyone!
Hope you're all very busy putting your BoM blocks together.....

This weekend I wanted to make something different as a quick project - that inevitably turned into a all weekend deal. I don't have a hexagon template ruler or whatever they're called - those plastic thingies - so I had to work out how to make one on my own.
My EQ7 program doesn't allow for anything that isn't a square, and my maths skills are well, lets just keep quiet about that.

I looked all over and finally after much investigation, it boils down to 2 things:

Thing 1: The angles on a hexagon are 60 degrees.

Thing 2: Whatever the length of the two furtherest points (the diameter of the hexi), the 6 sides of the hexagon are 1/2 of that.

Quite simple really........(yeah right!)

 This is a 5" square

Now, fold it in half, finger press it a little and drag it back down to the starting line.

If you have a ruler that shows the 60 Deg mark then good for you! but my cutting mat had the measurement on it, so, the dotted line on the cutting mat showed 60deg and thats where the rotarty cutter went swoosh.

This is thing 1...

now, the sides need to be half measurement of what the bottom (folded) measurement is, so I had to move the ruler down from the top to 2.5" across on the ruler, and then make a cut.

You remember - thing 2!!

 

This is the hexagon opened up again and put back to the middle with the two longest points still measuring 5"

The "thing" to also note is that this is now called a 2.5" hexagon - because of the measurement of the sides and NOT a 5" hexi.

 When sewing remeber that you are still going to need a 1/4" seam around the edges, so the finished hexi will be 2" on the sides and 4.5" in diameter.






Hope this helped and made sense!
I'll show a little later what I was up to with these little babies...

Have a gr8 Monday.