British Summer Clouds

Hutten-le-Hole in Yorkshire, Aug 2012

The Hexagon Obsession

The Obsession with Hexagons continues!

My Hexagon obsession started with the crochet variety a couple of years ago in the form of a cushion, inspired by this wonderful tutorial by Lucy of Attic24.

The original Hexagon Obsession Cushion

Recently it hit me again, except this time I had a really strong urge to Paper Piece and hand stitch some Hexagons together, I didn’t have a particular finished project in mind, I just knew I needed to do it… 

This urge coincided with our family holiday to Yorkshire, and because I start to panic if I don’t have some project to take with me, and being the big craft-geek that I am I started searching online for the nearest craft shops to where we were going to be staying.  However, for one reason or another I got distracted by general holiday, family, food and fun and forgot about my initial search.

 Vintage Hexagon Throw on my bed in the holiday cottage

When we arrived at the cottage where we were staying, and I walked into my bedroom for the week and the first thing I saw was this lovely Hexagon Patchwork Quilt on my bed, all hand stitched and beautifully finished – it was definitely a sign!

Judith's Fabrics in Whitby, Yorkshire

So, I was delighted when we stumbled upon this lovely little shop 'Judith's Fabrics' whilst on a visit to the seaside town of Whitby, it was stocked floor-to-ceiling with a wonderful selection of quilting fabrics and all sorts of haberdashery supplies.

My chosen fabrics, all by Tilda

I picked out my three favourite fat-quarters in the shop, bought a pack of needles and some white thread and set about stitching some Hexagons!

My first Panel of hand-stitched Hexagons!

By the end of the holiday I had a panel like the picture above... and no idea what to do with it (more cushions anyone?!) but I still felt a need to continue, so I decided to use up some of my stash to make another panel... 

Panel no.2 : Mushrooms (Jay Mccarroll), Honeycomb (Amy Butler) and some random purple stripe shirting from my stash!

So after a another week of absent minded stitching I had this Pink tonal variation...but I still hadn't had enough and by now I felt I ought to have some kind of aim to all of this hard work, so because I have no room for any more cushions in my life I decided I would turn these panels into a new quilt for my new spare room.

 The layout idea for the quilt

I decided that each panel should contain 3 tonal colours / patterns that would eventually be sewn together to create something looking like the picture above.

This is my lay plan of how many hexagons fit into a fat quarter on the left, and how many pieces of each colour I need in each of the 2 different panels on the right. Nerd.

And obviously because I'm such a nerd I had to build a layout on Adobe Illustrator so I could see what it might look like, how many of each panel I would have to make up and to figure out how many Hexagons (12cm inc Seam Allowance) I could fit onto a Fat Quarter.

 Panel No.3 begins...

So - I'm only on Panel No.3 at the moment and to complete the whole thing will clearly take me ages, but for now I am really enjoying the peaceful, therapeutic action of cutting, tacking, and stitching them all together, and it gives me a very good use for my enormous stash of quilting fabrics!

Sam's Super Fairy Cakes...

 

This is just a glimpse of the abundant Goodyear family creativity from this August 2012 Bank Holiday weekend.

These are Sam's traditional fairy cakes made with Rosewater and Lemon icing and they were absolutely delicious!