Saturday, May 1, 2010

Monster

I got so excited by the little hexagon pincushion that I made a bigger one to go with it:

hex little and big

Yes. The reason I invented when I was finishing it was, it is good to have one pincushion for pins and one for needles, so that nothing gets misplaced. (I have spent a lot of time looking for needles in a collection of pins.) It's a good reason!

The other excitement is a set of charm squares from a couple of years ago. (The collection is Shangri-La from Moda, I think). I noticed that each one can become two hexagons and leave a couple of scraps to maybe turn into coordinating diamonds, and I started something:

hex landscape

I'm not sure what this will be! (A sort of silly kitschy sleeve for my laptop, maybe.) So far it's a mass of hexagons, assembled more or less at random. The only assembly criterion I have is that two hexagons that are from the same colour group shouldn't abut.

Cutting out dozens of hexagons and basting them and sewing them together is slow and painstaking and repetitive and meditative work, which is exactly what I am interested in doing right now. The process goes something like this:

  1. Cut out some paper hexagons.
  2. Look at all the fabrics and pick out two or three from each colour group. Cut out some fabric hexagons.
  3. Fold one fabric hexagon of each colour around a paper hexagon and baste them at the corners.
  4. Pick three of them and assemble them into a three-hexagon unit.
  5. Put the new unit next to the already-assembled hexagons and admire everything.
  6. Attach the new unit to the old assemblage.

As you can see, I am grotesquely inefficient and spend a lot of time looking with admiration at my own work. The colours are so pretty.

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