Hexie quilt grows

Later than normal update today. We had a Snow Day. (Well, an Ice Day, truth be told. We got almost no snow where I am but the streets and sidewalks were badly icy until about an hour ago - church decided to cancel again this week, but that was partly because the heat went out in the Fellowship Hall part of the building).

So I stayed home and mostly worked on quilts. I did a bit more sewing on the current big quilt top, but then I decided I wanted to work more on the hexagon one-patch quilt.

I also did some more rummaging around and looking for scraps, and also odds and ends of fabric that I didn't have designated for a quilt (or for which I would not need ALL the fabric - like, half-yard pieces where I only planned on using a fat quarter's worth).

I also found the yarn and pattern for a knitting project I bought ages ago (the pattern is copyright 2000, but it might have been a couple years after that that I bought it) - three skeins of Reynolds' "Paris" (a chenille-type yarn) and a pattern for a very simple cowl. At different points in going through my supply closet I had found either one or the other and wondered if I still had the yarn (if I found the pattern) or the pattern (if I found the yarn). So I dug that out and actually started the cowl - it works as reading-knitting because it's knit in the round and all stockinette with no shaping.

But I also made a pile of new hexagons, and added some more to the quilt. It grows slowly but it's satisfying to see it get a tiny bit bigger with each new hexagon, and it's kind of fun trying to decide what color goes where.



It's a little bigger than it was last time. (I've also added a couple more patches since I took this photo).

Working on this top is pretty soothing. It's all handwork, but you can trade off the different steps as you feel like doing them. So Saturday afternoon I cut a ton of new patches because I kept finding little scraps that were big enough to get one or two hexagons out of (which also meant that those scraps would be gone out of my storage bins).

Sunday afternoon looked like this:



I got out my lap desk and "hemmed" hexagons (stitched the edges down over the papers - I do it without sewing through the papers, so I can pop them out and reuse them a few times) while I watched the Kitten Bowl. (Hallmark Channel now does a Kitten Bowl to compete with the Puppy Bowl on Animal Planet. Or at least they did this year; not sure if this is going to be an annual thing. Maybe then someone will come up with a Horsey Bowl, and a Lamb-and-Kid Bowl, and, I don't know, a Fish Bowl?*)

(*I think I've told the story before, which may be apocryphal, of the cable company that wanted to leave a new channel "open" before they started broadcasting the network that was to go into that slot, so they trained a camera on a fishtank in the office. When the new network started up and replaced the fishtank, they got lots of calls asking them to bring the fish back....)

The nice thing about the project, as I mentioned, is you can work on one stage until you get tired of it, and then go to another stage for a while.

I also decided what I'm going to do when the hexagon piece is finished: I'm going to get a large enough piece of plain cotton to applique it to, and then carefully cut away the cotton from behind the hexagons (so I can hand quilt it without too many layers). I don't want to cut the hexagons off square (you can see there's sort of a crenellated effect at the top) and it would be too much of an effort to bind that directly, if I made the top into a quilt by itself - so I think the "applique on a big rectangle to make binding easier" will be the way to go. (Also if I poop out on doing it before I've got it QUITE big enough for the bed, I can just make the border wider.)