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The End of an Era

It's hard to believe, but in mid-November, I finished basting hexagons. Completely finished.

A scatter of English paper piecing objects in the photographer's lap, which is half covered with a blue and white sweater and half with a denim skirt. There's a stack of upside-down fabric hexagons in the corner of the image, a single basted hexagon in the center with a blue stylized bee against a green-gold background, a clumsy brown leather thimble, and a black needle minder with a white bee embossed on it holding a needle and pin, and stuck on a white square of paper.
Bees!
Naturally, I saved some of the really fun prints for last. This little bee is just charming—and I made a (clumsy) leather thimble at last, after some of my marathon sewing ended up making a little hole in my finger from the head of the needle. I still haven't mastered anything more delicate than a basting stitch with the thimble, but it did help tremendously with the hundreds of hexagons I managed to complete as the finish line drew nearer.

A shot from above of a tabletop with colored felt-tip pens, a torn-out sheet of notebook paper with rough diagrams on it, a multicolored mug half full of tea, a laptop partly out of frame, silver sewing scissors in their black leather case, a black and cream bee needleminder, and a few stacks of geometric-patterned yellow fabric hexagons and the papers to go inside them. There's a lot going on.
Story of my life, basically.
In the midst of hexifying, I also measured and made up little blueprints of every wall in my kitchen (there are a bunch) so we can start thinking about how we want to improve it. And so I can do math about how many tiles I need to acquire for various surfaces.

A close-up of a brown cardboard hexagon template with several lines crossing it in seemingly random directions. Several of the spaces defined by the intersecting lines are filled with small patterns, including a white bunny against a black background, a large camellia flower and leaf, a shower of arrows, and shibori waves.
I was gonna zentangle it to death, but...
I wanted to give myself a much bigger seam allowance for the few silk hexies I planned to add for textural variation (and a little color contrast), so I traced one of my punched paper templates onto a piece of cardboard. Twice. The first time I put it far too close to the edge of the cardboard, and ran out of room for the nearly 1-inch margins I was adding—so I ended up with an interestingly subdivided pattern on the final silk template. Naturally, I saw a potential quilt, and started filling the subdivisions with patterns...but then I had time to actually mark and cut the silk, and I stopped frittering about with the template.

A white hand holding a four-colored stack of large silk hexagons, seen on edge. From left, they're medium blue, gold, cream, and dark brown.
No, I did not re-iron this fabric. I already ironed it! Two years ago!
Marking big hexagons on silk of many colors proved an exercise in delicacy; the white I marked in pencil, the brown and blue in chalk, and the yellow in tears, because of all of these, the yellow is salvaged from a shirt that looked not nearly as charming as I'd hoped and is extremely thin, fluttery stuff. Luckily, with seam allowances as massive as I was using, I didn't need to be horribly precise in marking or cutting (which, yes, meant I also did not fuss even a little about ironing before I worked with these fabrics).

A close-up of blue and gold basted hexagon quilt pieces, with laughably huge seam allowances that stick up in back like little pyramids of excess fabric.
They're like truffles!
Okay, so maybe I overdid the seam allowance a bit. They amuse me, and I decided to leave them fluffy.

A close-up of a paper hexagon with a rather impressionist painting of a lush summer meadow, centered on a medium-blue silk hexagon, on a white hand with fingers spread to support the fabric.
Pretty paper for the very last hexagon basted.
I saved the blue for last, since it was nearly the first fabric I chose for this project.

A close-up of a single silk hexagon, upside down on blue-and-white brocade fabric, with the seam allowance carefully arranged into a neat peak of pleats. The hexagon looks black. It's not. But apparently it wants to be.
I filtered the snot out of this photo and that silk still looks black.
I did have a lot of fun arranging the little pleats on the backs of the silk hexies to make them swirl together nicely.

13 hexagon papers, seen from above on a very dark grey background. There are three white with text, four peachy-orange, one pale green, and five with bits of landscape photos or paintings.
Don't worry, it was an uncorrected advance proof.
And here's the remaining hexagon papers! I was trying to run out exactly, but I also didn't want to get stuck out somewhere, all but done basting, without enough papers to finish. So I punched a few more than I thought I'd need, and that worked out just fine.

A copy paper box absolutely stuffed to the brim with neat plastic baggies of stacked yellow fabric hexagons, sitting on a dull teal couch next to a small Llasa apso.
Muppet for scale.
Neatly stacked, the hexies all fit in this copy paper box, with a bit of smooshing to get the smaller stacks of silk hexies in. I counted as I unpacked them and dumped them into a tote box for mixing, and came up with 6,285 hexies total. This is a different total again than any of the totals I discovered while attempting to calculate how many hexies I'd need for the quilt sizes I want to create, and I'm just gonna live with it. Good grief.

A photo of three patterned purple fabrics, laid out in vertical bands. The leftmost is lilac with a darker allover print of slim leafy vines and poison dart frogs. The middle is pale pink with lilac-colored cameos of roses, and dots filling the space between cameos. The rightmost is dark purple, with an allover magenta flowe-and-leaf print and occasional bright-pink flowers.
Cue the ominous music.
I feel an obsessive-basting-of-tiny-pieces hole in my life, now that I have no hexagons to make, and there was a sale, and I had some cash in my hobby budget, and...well...

Did you know there's a shape in quilting that's called a shell? I think a purple shell quilt will be both beautiful and deeply amusing someday.

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