I've Been Hexed...

 I've been hexed. I've completely fallen for hexagon quilts and paper piecing. This bright little beauty was my intro into quilting. It all started a little over a year ago when I got this crazy idea that I was going to be a quilter. There was only one problem. I didn't own a sewing machine. I didn't know how to sew a straight line. I didn't even own any thread. How was this going to work? I know! I'll do it by hand! I wasn't going to let that stop me. After all, people have been doing this for eons right? Like, since before they wrote on rocks, right? I got this... Que well intentioned friends saying " You're going to do what?... Uh, are you sure?... You know, Jerriann, they had whole groups of women working on these things..." 

Well. Ok. If they can do it why can't I?

For a girl who struggled with math in school the thought of figuring out dimensions and fabric requirements for hundreds of little  hexagons was, to say the least, a bit overwhelming. Luckily I found a neat online dimension calculator at CD Designs. You provide the parameters and it does the rest. It didn't take me long to stumble upon PaperPieces.com, either. Which is a good thing because that's where I found printable hexagon graph paper (in the picture below) and a bunch of other paper piecing shapes, for you to color in and design on your own.



While I can appreciate random placement I'm a bit too fastidious for that mind set in my own designs. So I'm glad I found that resource. I worried too much about having enough fabric and balance, and proportion. I felt compelled to plan, plan, plan. I also realized that I had slightly less green than I did of the rest of the colors so I had to be careful where I placed them. It sure would suck to work on this bad boy for two or three years just to find out I only need two more blocks of green bats and cant find this very specific Halloween fabric anymore. 

Right. So I played with the design a little and settled on a block of 8 flowers in two rows, did a little flipping around, and staggered their starting points. This lends a "random" appearance to the placement, but to satisfy my hypercritical planning are, in fact, very much a pattern.  



Paper piecing is a good project to have because its so portable. I usually attack this one during my lunch break at work or when I'm at my grandpa's house. He likes to watch westerns and I like his company, so it works out great. I don't get bored. You won't believe how much you can get done while you're stuck in an airport because your delayed plane made you miss your connecting flight.

When I look back at when I started this I remember hearing the voices of my friends in my head: "You're going to do what?...Are you sure?..." And I wondered the same thing.  But now, I can see how much I've accomplished one little hour at a time and I just wanna say put that in your pipe and smoke it!