Happy Hexie New Year!

Happy New Year everybody!

Before Christmas, the design wall looked like this image on the left and now it's full of hexie flowers!

You would have thought I'd have had enough of hexagon projects at this stage but nope, still hand sewing hexies right into the New Year!

A lot of the predictions for this year included more slow stitching, hand sewing projects like the New Hexagon & Millefiori/La Passacaglia projects that were very popular last year.  I have loved following everyone's projects on these, particularly Wendy's that she has shared on her blog Wendy's Quilts and more!  Though not a deliberate decision on my part to do so much hand sewing, it has been a blessing.  My poor Janome, (less than a year old), has given up sewing!  She is going back to the shop this week for repair.

Resting in the spare bedroom over Christmas taking a break!

I started hearing clunking noises in the bobbin during free motion quilting and it got worse and worse until eventually the bobbin case jammed up completely.  So while that's been out of action, I dusted off my small Pfaff and finished up a table runner for Mum.  This was a super quick project.  Some layer cake squares cut into 5" x 10" bricks with some 5"x5" in between and quilted with a wiggly circle pattern. 

She likes it a lot and I have to keep reminding myself sometimes simple is the best way to go!  I have a habit of gravitating towards complex designs and forget that simple can be pretty and effective too!

So while my main machine is resting at the repair shop, it's hand stitching for me.  Last year (weird to be typing that still!) our branch of the Irish Patchwork Society swapped 2 1/2" squares, about 400 of them!  We were challenged to make a quilt using the squares and trying to do something different I decided to make hexagons out of them!

During one of the nights Mum stayed over in our house, we spent a few hours sorting the squares into colours (while watching Foyle's War on the telly!)  Before Christmas, I arranged them into flowers and stacked them all on the lid of an Ikea box.

This meant I could sit on the sofa and sew away to my hearts content while watching more TV.  All 4 Indiana Jones, Kelly's Heroes, Back to the Future, Santa Paws, and of course my favourite: Doctor Who!

I thought I was on to a winning plan here but I underestimated how long it takes to hand sew 400+152 more I added to the pile to make up my design!

And there was Wilbur!  The dogs loved the fact that we were around so much and took up residence on the sofa beside me.  Wilbur got it into his head that my colourful hexies must be sweets and tried a few times to eat them!

Guess who the culprit was!

Thankfully he didn't mange to tip the whole lot off of my lap but he did succeed in knocking over the Christmas tree 5 times!

Being a Basset Hound, Wilbur has long ears and you have to clean them for him every few weeks.  He hates this and hid under the tree when he saw G reaching for the ear cleaning bottle.  #1.

#2 & #3 happened at night.  No idea what happened.  Woke up to find tree tipped over twice.

#4 I'm blaming G for not putting the tree back properly as it didn't last long this time at all and broke the lights.

#5 My fault!  I left a box of Cadbury's biscuits in a Christmas present bag under the tree and big nosed Basset must've been having a sniff as we found teeth marks in the tin and the tree on the floor.  Thankfully the new lights still work!  At this stage, I was nearly tempted to give up on the tree but I took a deep breath and made a cup of tea and put it back up again!

Beginnings of a design - more on this later!

That's kind of how I feel about these hexies at this stage.  Take a deep breath, make a cup of tea and get on with it.  The challenge deadline is this Friday at our first meeting of 2016!  A busy start to the new year, even without my big sewing machine.  How was your  holiday break?  Hope all had a lovely time and here's to a slow stitching, handmade new year!