A Slow Start

Wow. Last week when I put Candied Hexagons into the hoop there were times that I felt as though I had never quilted before; it was almost painful. For starters, I was still puzzling through how to quilt it but I figured if I just put it in the hoop the inspiration would come. Not so fast...

After much noodling I decided that I'd just loosen up a little and try something new. These hexies are all different and, true to the pattern name, remind me of a huge handful of candies so I'm going to play a little bit and quilt each one differently. Well, maybe not all different designs, but enough variety to mix it up a bit and make it interesting.

The second criteria is that I didn't want the quilting to be predictable, but the patterns needed to be straight lines - no curves - because I don't want to have to deal with marking it. More head scratching.

Eventually the first pattern appeared but there was a fair bit of undoing before I had something that I was happy with. There were other challenges too. For some reason I seemed to have found the one needle in the pincushion that had the world's smallest eye, and, since I was working in poor lighting, blue smoke could be seen coming from my chair as I continually failed to thread it. I finally traded it in for a better model and set myself up with a better lamp, both of which were game changers. Whew!

So now I've got a rhythm back to my stitching and I'm starting to get an idea of how it might come together. I'm looking forward to making some progress on it during today's football playoffs. Fingers crossed that it will be a more relaxing experience than last weekend's....M