Well I finally decided on what I want to do for my next hand piecing project, and it combines two things I dearly love – hexagon pieces and my treasured stash of Jo Morton fabrics. I want a quilt for my bed that is flowers made out of hexagons, 1″ hexagons to be precise, so that’s a lot of hexagons, but that’s ok because I have a lot of Jo Morton fabric. I’m going to use English Paper Piecing as the mechanism, it is fast and I enjoy it for hexagons very much.

I cut some tentative pieces and made a few flowers and they went together really fast. I can easily make 3 in the evening after work and chores are all done which is pretty spiffy. In no time at all I had a stack of 30 flowers and started evaluating putting them together. I figured at 3 a night, I could have enough for the bed sized quilt in 4 months, and I distinctly remember telling Jack that estimate and being rather disappointed that the effort would only take 4 months. I really wanted this project to last at least a year in the making. More on that in a minute.

Hexagons are tricky little buggers. They will go neatly in a row as individuals, but when you put 7 together in a flower (6 around a center), they don’t like to line up, they prefer more to wander off, leaning distinctly in one direction. So that means that to put all my little flowers together I had two choices: 1) always have a bed quilt that leans to one side which would drive me absolutely bonkers or 2) throw in the odd single hexagon so that I could put the flowers together in regular rows that marched neatly and evenly across the bed. Ok, I can do the odd single hexagon so that’s good. I laid it out on the computer to make sure I understood the repeat of the pattern and printed that off.

I sat down this weekend, with my stack of 30 flowers and my printout and thought well I’ll start assembling these and see how many flowers it takes to get the whole way across the bed with a drop. I got stuck in on that effort Sunday and last night I realized that my piddling little 4 month estimate was wildly inaccurate. While it might take only 4 months to make the individual flowers, it is going to take exponentially longer than that to put them all together into the quilt top.

I had quite a laugh at myself, thinking that I had been so disappointed that this project would only last six months. HA. I’ll be lucky if I get the top pieced in a year and six months now that I understand what I’m doing. So much for my miscalculations. It’s all going to be ok. I wanted this project to be my hand piecing project for a decent chunk of time, and it looks like despite the initial inaccuracies in my estimations, it will indeed take at least a year to accomplish and I’m ok with that. I’m also really happy with how this first row is shaping up, and I’m glad I finally have a project worthy of my Jo stash.

I’ll periodically give some updates here on the blog. Especially at the 4 month mark. That will be a special update. I might even have a handle on exactly how many flowers it will take to cover the bed. I don’t want to take a stab at estimating that yet…..