Oh so easily distracted ..... ( or "Quilt Guilt")

Well hi there Blogland neighbors!!Are you one of those people who can stick with something until they get the job done, OR are you easily distracted ..... swayed by a passing thought that just mushrooms out of control and you get just a TEENSY bit obsessed and OFF COURSE? Well, we can refer to it as attention deficit OR we can refer to it as "following your muse" ... now doesn't that have a nice ring to it?!?! OK, so anyhow....over the past 2 or 3 weeks, I've been trying to stay focused on ...


.....this little stitchery project that I had in my head for about a year (I finally got it from a drawing on a piece of scrap paper to fabric while we were at the shore a couple of weeks ago...) HOWEVER, still being in shore mode when we came home, I couldn't help myself and I dove head first into some fun beachy fabric and started working on ....


....another quilt.....(while Matt's yet to be quilted graduation quilt sits there staring at me with those big "please finish me" eyes) ...and, yes my quilt guilt runneth over !!!)

ANYHOW, yesterday started out dark and thunderstormy, so I decided to treat myself to a few hours of sewing (the heck with the laundry pile, gross bathrooms, piles of dishes in the sinks, and inches of DUST and cat hair all over everything .... the male contingent around here doesn't seem to have a single worry about these things ... so I'm forcing myself to also blissfully ignore all that crap too!!!) anyhow, as I was saying before I got off on yet another tangent ... I decided to sew (with the full intention of working on the above projects) and watch one of my VERY FAVORITE MOVIES ....


..."How to Make an American Quilt"










So, there I am all set up with my movie and my projects when I remembered my McCall's Quilting magazine that came a couple of days ago that I didn't really get a chance to look at yet .... so off I go to get my magazine from the kitchen where I left it .... and I went into slobber mode when I saw the cover !!!!!


(oops, sorry about the glare and lousy picture ... the MBIAJ Photography Dept dropped their camera a few days ago and it's not working at all, so they're using their old camera .... not that they took any better pictures with the new camera ... but they thought this could pass as a handy excuse ... !!)

ANYHOW , back to the quilt on the cover of the magazine .... don't ya just LOVE it?!?!?!!!! Wait, let me open it up to the page it's on....


.....this is Sandy Klop's "Merry-Go-Round" quilt .... and it's a WINNER in my book!!! and looky who made her own version .....Monica .... another WINNER !! OK, so there I am just slobbering all over the picture of this quilt in the magazine and I then recalled that a couple of years (yes YEARS ) ago I saw a crocheted hexagon aphghan in some catalog and I thought that I could do something similar with wool ...so I started rummaging around in the zillions of storage areas (translation ... plastic grocery bags .... which , I know , you're not supposed to store fabric in .... but I leave the bags open so the fabric can get some air and hopefully not rot by the time I get back to that particular brainstorm...) and found the pieces that I finished so far ....

... as you can see, right now this is only big enough to cover somebody's feet (or in Evan's case .... one foot) .... anyhow, it's really easy to make .... just a hexagon shape cut out of wool and another smaller hexagon shape appliqued on it (and also, that little snowflake looking doo dad appliqued in the center) .... then I just butted the pieces up against each other and zig zagged it together (so far I only have the 3 blocks on the left end stitched together .... if you click on the picture to enlarge it you can see it better.) Anyhow, seeing Sandy Klop's hexagon quilt and Monica's hexagon quilt in cute cotton fabrics, I , of course, wanted to start one in cotton fabrics, too .... RIGHT NOW! Sandy's instructions include making strip sets , then using a triangle tool to cut 3 triangles from the strip sets for each half of a hexagon. This looks quick, easy and fun .... if you have the triangle tool .... but I don't .... and I had ants in my pants to get started on this quilt so I thought I could just make a hexagon pattern and cut it in half (because Sandy's pattern ingeniously has you sew 3 triangle sets together to make a half hexagon to sew to an adjacent half hexagon to make long rows of half hexagons that eventually get sewn to another row of half hexagons which totally eliminates those pesky "Y" seams!!! BRILLIANT!!!) .... so, why mess with a great idea ... so like I said, I just made a pattern for a half hexagon and another pattern for a smaller half hexagon ....
...I traced the bigger half hexagon onto freezer paper (2 for each fabric)...
...and I traced the smaller half hexagon onto light fusible web (2 for each fabric)
...iron 2 freezer paper half hexagons to the right side of the fabric you want for the larger hexagon and...
....iron 2 fusible web smaller hexagons to the wrong side of the fabric you want for the smaller center hexagon.

....cut out your fabric hexagons from the freezer paper and the fusible web .... fuse one small half hexagon to the center of a large half hexagon .... do this again on a second set of half hexagons...

...next, I machine appliqued the smaller hexagon halves onto the bigger hexagon halves....

....then I followed Sandy Klop's instructions to sew the side of a bottom half of a hexagon to the side of a top half of a neighboring half hexagon ....














....anyhow, after I got it down to a system, it went pretty fast .... so this is what I've got so far ....

....another UNFINISHED QUILT that's what!!!!!....oh well, that's OK ... it was fun to figure out and work on ! (so there piles of stinky laundry and piles of dirty dishes that are still waiting for somebody to clean them up..... you can just wait a little bit longer ... I think I feel another idea coming over me!!)

Be back soon! (I hope ... we still have to switch our email address and I'm hoping that when we do that my blogging fun doesn't get screwed up!)
Toodles,
Mary Anne (aka Mare)