I hope everyone is enjoying spring! I've been enjoying the weather! I did get sick with a stomach flu that wasn't a lot of fun. It cut into my productivity, but I'm all better now and am starting to make progress again.
I started a new quilting project. I have made a queen-sized quilt for each of my nieces and nephews for their college graduations. I'm down to my last niece and she is scheduled to graduate in December, so it's time to get started on her quilt. I've been thinking about her quilt for several years now. She's the activist in the family and is very supportive of the LGBTQ community (I'm so proud of her!) so I wanted to do something that reflected that. I purchased this pattern in Houston in 2018 because I thought it would be perfect:
The pattern is Hexactly by Hunter's Design Studio. I liked the crisp, modern feel of this pattern and thought it would be perfect with the hexagons done in the LGBTQ rainbow colors. So, I pulled out the pattern and started planning. The picture on the front of the pattern is for the twin-sized version of the quilt. The queen-sized version of the quilt looks the same, but has 11 columns of hexagons. I really want just the rainbow colors, so I'll be changing it up a bit. So, I'll be doing 7 columns like the twin-sized quilt (the LGBTQ rainbow actually has 6 colors, but I'm taking some license here because odd numbers look better and I like having some of the columns go up and other columns going down). I'm going to piece each column and set them on top of the background before making any other final decisions, but my initial feeling is that, unlike the picture, I will separate the columns with some background to make the motif wider so it isn't lost in the middle of the bigger quilt. Then I will probably line up the largest hexagons evenly across the quilt, instead of staggering them up and down like the picture, with the other hexagons going up and down as in the picture. Then, with the quilting I'll add ghost hexagons in the column colors so that all of the columns end up having the same number and sizes of hexagons and they just alternate which are pieced and which are quilted. The rest of the quilting will probably some form of vertical straight-line quilting. I'm currently calling this quilt "Inclusivity," although the name could change before I'm finished. I have several months before I have to make that decision!
I did have to order a large quantity of a solid fabric for the background of the quilt so I went to thousandsofbolts.com, my favorite online fabric shop that carries every color of the Moda Bella Solids fabric that I love. I have a color card at home with a bunch of fabric samples of this fabric, so I got that out and looked at the grays. I was initially thinking I would use a light to medium gray for the background. But when I was looking at the fabric samples, my eye kept being drawn back to this charcoal sample. It's a beautiful dark gray with a brown undertone. It still is very modern, but is less mainstream than the lighter grey I was thinking about. The other colors I've chosen are bright, standard rainbow colors.
This picture doesn't capture the brown undertones of the solid, but you get the idea. I also decided that I would use a single fabric for each rainbow color since I don't think that making that part scrappy would add anything to the quilt. That was a hard decision for me since I'm so attracted to scrap quilts!
So, now it was time to start the piecing. There's not a lot of piecing in this quilt, but the hexagon angles make the cutting an sewing take more time. To cut the hexagons, I made a copy of the hexagon shapes in the pattern, cut them out and taped them to the back of my rotary ruler. Then, I lined that shape up to the edges of the fabric and cut each edge.
I didn't stack my fabrics when cutting the hexagons because I wanted the cutting to be as accurate as possible.
Then I cut out all of the connecting triangles from the background fabric and started piecing. I got all of the side pieces sewn onto the hexagons to make them the same width:
And got the triangles added to the largest hexagons:
I feel like I'm making pretty good progress so far! And I'm loving the colors!!
Before starting my niece's quilt, I went ahead and finished my project bag with the free-motion couched spirals panels I had made. I wanted to get those panels off of my cutting table so I could get started on this project, but I didn't want to stow them somewhere where they might never get finished into anything. I found a brown fabric with circles on it in my stash that I thought went perfectly with the panels:
I really like how this bag turned out. It's a little larger than my other bags so I think it'll be very useful for some of my larger projects. For now, I've put a couple of balls of worsted weight yarn in this bag, hoping to start a pair of socks from a Craftsy class on knitting socks two-at-at-time. This would be my first pair of socks, so making them out of worsted weight yarn will make the process quicker and let me learn the process before moving on to the smaller sock-weight yarns. But we'll see when I get around to that....
But I have been doing some knitting. I made some progress on my Baby Novus sweater. I got the back panel finished:
And then I started on one of the side panels. I was actually working on the side panel when I got sick and ended up being too tired and had too much stomach pain to finish the last couple of rows. I picked this back up when I was feeling better, but I wasn't 100% yet so I found I was having trouble concentrating on the pattern and screwed up a few things, but nothing bad enough to take it out. So I finished that part, then put the project back down again for a later time:
Fortunately, when I put aside the baby sweater, I also got my next installment of my Sunshower Shawl project in the mail. So far, this pattern is just a huge number of knit stitches with some YOs and increases scattered around so it was the perfect project for someone who couldn't concentrate well. I got this month's installment done in a single day:
Then I decided that I should also finish my Moxie Cowl. All of the knitting had been finished on this project for a couple of weeks and I had even soaked it and pinned it to the blocking boards, so all I needed to do was stitch the sides together into a circle. So I pulled that off of the blocking boards and stitched it up with a Kitchener stitch. I haven't done much Kitchener stitch so I had done the stitches much too tightly, but it was easy to go back and adjust the yarn to get a perfect tension on the stitches after the fact. I really love how this cowl turned out!!
And I made my favorite model show how it looks in use:
Damn, he's cute!!
Finally, I did some more work on my Ironish scarf:
The stitch pattern in the middle of this scarf is really easy to memorize and is really fun to do! I'm almost done with the center section and I'm going to miss working on it, but really look forward to wearing it!
Well, that's all for this time. Hopefully I'll make some good progress on my niece's quilt before next time. I'm really looking forward to getting the columns of hexagons done so I can start playing around with layouts!
Nancy
