considering

In August 2013 I posted a tutorial for a Lonestar Hexagon block to be made by my quilting bee mates at the time. Yikes time flies! It took some time to receive the blocks (in fact, two never got here - sad sauce) but really most of the gap between then and now was me putting it away and taking a break from quilting. 

Now I'm ironing and trimming. :) 

I had quite a few wrinkles to get out and 60 sides to trim to get these bad boys approximating regular hexagons. When I start sewing them together we will see just how good of a job I did! I think looking back it was quite brave (read: naive) of me to put away blocks with potentially distortable edges for so long. Any block can stretch out if not treated gently, but triangles and diamonds? My goodness. All I have to do is look at it and think "stretch". 

We all made from our stashes following general guidelines for colors. I really enjoy seeing everyone's interpretations of a single color scheme and all the pretty fabric combinations in these blocks. Originally I pictured in my head a more unified color palette, but I love the crazy quilt feel of this now!

I played with these on the floor (aka my 'design wall') for a while before I got to a place where I liked the relative positions and mixture of colors. Now I'm just trying to decide on a layout. I started out thinking I would sew them all together plain and simple but then wanted the quilt to end up bigger. Then I considered sashing between all the blocks which would look neat, but then I turned the blocks 30 degrees and put them all point to point. I'm kind of liking this idea. I would cut a bunch of equilateral triangles to fill in those gaps and end up with a secondary star pattern - a star-within-a-star if I'm imagining it correctly. Might be kind of cool! 

I'm hoping to make it a twin-sized quilt for my niece's birthday in April. Maybe Christmas! Now that I'm looking at it, I'm wondering if should make 4 more blocks and add columns of two on each side to make it a hexagon quilt…. anyone want to help? :) Maybe I should get my triangles sewn into what I have so far first.

out of hibernation

What's that I spy? A long lost knitting project peeking out to make its presence known? Why hello there, Aidez, it's been so long since I've seen you. 

I haven't touched this project since January 2013 when, a few months after starting it, my primary goal was to knit through enough of the pattern to decide if the yarn was a good match and it seemed like something I could reasonably do given my skill level. I did, and I liked it, but in the whirlwind of wrapping up my Ph.D. and diving headlong into my policy fellowship, a complicated cable sweater pattern just didn't' seem like something I wanted to tackle. 

Fast forward to now: thesis done, fellowship experienced, and new job well underway. I've finished quite a few longtime in-progress projects the last few months and decided it was time to pick this one back up to continue the trend. Turns out the activation barrier was purely mental and it's not that complicated of a piece to work on. I can't really heavily multitask while working on it, but certainly it's ok to watch an episode of Arrow while knitting.

I'm already through half of the back and still itching to get my hands back on it each day. That's a good sign and one I hope will mean progress will continue at a steady pace. Similar to projects with stripes, this pattern makes me want to keep working "just one more row" to see the center latticework emerge. Like Dory in Finding Nemo, just keep stitching. 

tide pool

This arrangement of yarn and stitches is reminding me of some of the tide pools down in Monterey Bay.

Metaphor aside, I've made some significant progress on Fomhar since December. The whole central panel is finished. This is still my slow and steady in between project, but I'm excited to see what this looks like when it blocks out. It will certainly grow, and all of the little lace details will really open up and show off this yarn. 

I'm getting better at reading complex charts for sure. The final border section of this pattern may have some mistakes in the written pattern (according to several Ravelry folks) so I'm hoping to refer primarily to the charts from here on out but boy do they sometimes get confusing! I'm on to the first border section which is more lacy little fans. Still loving the yarn and the pattern choice.