Hexagon Love

I try to use the expression 'I haven't had this much fun since the pigs ate Uncle Billy' sparingly. First uttered by Katie Putrick on The Word in the 1980s, it's a phrase that delighted me and my sister as teenagers and has become a part of our own lexicon for expressing extreme joy ever since. A quick blog search reveals that I have only allowed myself to type those words on one occasion in relation to a fabric marking pen back in September 2008. It worries me as to what I will be left with to convey supreme happiness if I go sprinkling this phrase liberally over everything that delights me.

So hand piecing hexagons: truly, even more fun than the pigs eating Uncle Billy. The pigs would have had to have started in on Auntie Sue too to have beaten this. I have fallen in love with the whole process: from hand cutting every paper hexagon, to tacking the seam allowance around the paper, arranging the hexagons in a pleasing order and then piecing them together in rows using beloved ladder stitch (I never tire of this stitch and its ability to disappear into the fabric), and then finally joining the rows to one another. What delights me most is that every element of this process is small, transportable, done by hand and needs very little concentration. I have finally found something that gives me all that I wanted from knitting (a sociable, portable activity), but that I failed to find due to my lack of competence. I have pieced hexagons while we watched family films, while I've done homework with the children and in between stirrings at the cooker and because it is slow, slow work, it has that lovely feeling of being a long project that it's pointless to try to race through.

Being December, I can't show clear shots of anything, so for now, I'm sharing the backs of my hexagons...which I love almost as much as the fronts. I am so excited to show you what I was working on when January arrives.

In no particular order, this is what else I have been up to this week (this only covers the sewing elements...I really do get up to lots of other things too).

• My husband wants a quilt for his January birthday, so I have been stalking the online fabric shops for prints suitable for a Man Quilt...it has been necessary to order from three different places and I've yet to decide on the backing for it. Oh dear. I have an idea for this quilt that leaves me so excited that I feel unjustifiably annoyed that people are using the Royal Mail to do normal things like sending Christmas cards, meaning that deliveries of fabric supplies may take a few days longer. 
• I have been doing extra intensive ogling of the Anna Maria Horner's Innocent Crush fabric line which has now arrived in England - available at Seamstar and at M is for Make, which also has the full range of voiles from this line. Quite simply, breathtakingly lovely.
• I have been feeling extraordinarily indecisive about which Innocent Crush fabrics I love the most...but not for much longer, I think...more on that soon hopefully.   
• At his request I've been teaching my husband to sew...and he is stonkingly good at it and puts my own hand-sewing to shame. He will not be making his own quilt though.
• When not hand-sewing, I've been at the machine. Yesterday I made my way through over 500m of thread...which, divided between the spool holder and the bobbin, surely means that I sewed at least 250 metres, no? I'm still hankering after a sewing machine milometer...

Florence x