When I started the first hexagon quilt, I almost figured that it would be something that I’d start and then tire of, since I have the attention span of a goldfish swimming in a tank of Red Bull – things just don’t hold my attention the way I want them to. So when I actually finished the top, I was surprised to find that I actually enjoyed the hand sewing, and I missed it, to an extent – I was able to curl up on the couch and sew next to my husband in the evenings, instead of being upstairs in my craft room by myself.
To add to it, I’ve been fretting over my scrap pile. There it was, full of lovely and useful fabrics that I just couldn’t come up with a viable purpose for; I tried forcing myself to create blocks from them, but my brain just couldn’t wrap around it. In a burst of energy, I decided to cut it up into 2.5″ squares and just start slapping them together; one way or another, those scraps were getting used!
However, 2.5″ squares just happen to be the right size for the hexagons that I used in the flower quilt. And I had a ton of the hex papers left over. Thus, the Scrap Hex was born.
There really isn’t a plan to this, other than to just randomly join one hexagon to another until the thing is the size that I’d like it to be. And also, to get that rainbow of fabric used up. Right now, the loose plan is to create blocks of 6×6 hexagons, since that seems to be a decent size, and then to join them as I complete them to the overall blanket. That might shift and change, and it might take me years to get it done, but in the end it doesn’t matter.
What I learned from this, though, is that I don’t really do a lot with purple, red or yellow fabrics. My scraps of those colors are rather sparse; I think I need to pull together a quilt from each color in order to create scraps. It would also be a good exercise in trying to use random fabrics from different lines, since most coordinated lines tend to have a color scheme instead of a single color.
Along with that, I also decided that I’d like to try my hand at some diamonds; I’ve seen some amazing EPP diamond quilts, and since the methodology is the same, I ordered some of the 1.5″ paper templates online. Because I am too lazy to create them myself.
Two stars in, and I can say that I don’t enjoy it as much as I do the hexagons; this might be destined for a pillow instead of a quilt. It’s the damn centers where all six points join up that I’m not really liking. Maybe they’ll grow on me; I’m trying to do one a night until I’ve got a number of them created, and then I’ll start joining them together with a white background. For these, I am actually trimming them to match the shape of the diamond – I don’t do that with the hexagons.
My sewing machine isn’t getting too much work these days, simply because I’m too busy to fire it up and dedicate time at it. These hand sewing projects are pick up and go, whenever you have five free minutes type of things, and that suits the way my schedule is right now. It’s nice to have something I can pick up and go with after a full day of work and a full night of class to help wind me down before I start it all over again the next day.
