the midnight scrapper: in order to not let the hexi madness get you down, you have to have a system...

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When I first declared that I was indeed brave enough to undertake this fun quilt project I had a comment that said...don't you know they are called the 10 year quilt! LOL

Now don't get me wrong, with my fingers in spasms from all that hand sewing, I can see the joke and it's totally on me!!!

Still, I like to think that I can break things down and develop a "process" that lets me get the job done (yeah, I know, a little to OCD to be a true creative spirit) around work and all the other fun things I fill my days with (shop, cook, clean, wash etc etc)

First I went a fabric hunting, looking for all my scraps that would work with this quilt, and then I cut them with my rotary cutter into 4" x 4" squares - 6 x each colour. Then I rounded up all my solid scraps and cut about 10 of each colour the same way. See, a pretty pile of fabric.

I had already photocopied my template onto card and then spent many lunch hours at work cutting out the hexi's that would be used inside the fabric. Mind numbingly boring but I had company and I got through them pretty fast.

So now you just have to find all your pins and start folding the fabric. Yes I know there are easier ways to do this (I'm talking to you Miss Robyn with the "I only need 1 pin as I baste" bragging. Ha!) but this is my way.

And I pin all 6 patterned fabrics and a co-ordinating centre fabric and I make a little stack that one day will become a beautiful "hexi flower". I do this till I run out of pins and I have a lot of little stacks piled up.

Then I start to baste, and baste, and baste, till my pin box fills back up and I start all over again.

And you just keep doing this over and over and over. You can throw a good DVD on, that helps. You can take a little bag on the road if you know you will be waiting at the kids soccer.

And then one day you have burned through all those little piles and you realise that you have exhausted your stash. And the rainbow comes out and the angels begin to sing...

The box you have been storing them in is FULL. I have 128 "flowers" ready to go. I had made a few mixed fabric flowers when I first started to think about this type of quilt, just to see if I could do it but quickly changed my plan to have matching fabric on each flower with a plain centre.

You see, I really do have to have these things thoroughly sorted in my brain before I progress because changing gears midway is going make me break out in a rash LOL

And then it's time to make a flower...

I have made 3 of these little beauties now and I love them even more because of the huge lead up. So I will sew the remaining 125 flowers and lay them out and see how big the quilt might be. Then, it's back to cutting basting and sewing to make enough flowers to finish the quilt.

At this point I don't want to have to buy any more fabric (it is supposed to be a scrap quilt) so I will double up on favourite fabrics and change out the centre colour to make it look a little different.

A clinical / anal / OCD approach...maybe, well sort of, OK, yes it is.

10 years in the making...HELL NO!!!!!!