Feeling Hex'd again

Everybody who quilts has orphan quilt blocks. Maybe you won the block raffle at your local quilt guild meeting and received some, hmmm, unusual blocks. Or maybe, with the best of intentions, you began a quilt and after a hard time piecing a block, decided not to continue. Or your friends gave you left-over blocks of theirs.

Or one morning you stepped out and found a bag on the porch and it has-gasp!-old quilt blocks in it. Dump-and-run quilting--this has actually happened to me and the only thing I can surmise is that the dumpee felt guilty, couldn't bear to trash the work, and knew I'd "do something" with them. This is likely the same person who gifted you with not one but a litter of kittens. And you took those too.



But my orphan blocks have been hanging around in a box for years labelled 'block fodder.' They were mine and I could do with them what I liked...so I cut them up. After getting a set of Big Hexie templates made, I went on a rampage. Took out my frustration on those poor orphan blocks...and it felt good. I actually got to laughing as I sliced them!








A funky patchwork block that individually was a real loser, once cut into a hexagon, assumed new importance and interest. Talk about a makeover! The fabric holding the blocks together (the diamonds and border) in this composition is a shot cotton. The shot cotton fabric has two colors of thread: a dark reddish/purple warp and then a royal blue weft. If you look at the fabric from different angles, it seems to change color.


Stuff like this keeps me interested in quilting. If someone told me, "Now you must make 300 identical red and white quilt blocks----" I'd jump off a bridge. This is quilting for someone with attention deficit disorder. Funny thing is, once the excitement of assembling this piece is done, I'll hand-quilt the thing. Mood swings are common in my world: from total rotary cutter madness to the zen buzz of methodical hand stitching.