Tags

, , , ,

In addition to Project Life I also do a lot of different crafts including quilting, crocheting and knitting – all ‘very’ practical hobbies to have when you live in tropical northern Australia where it is lucky to ever get below 15 degrees celsius!

I did a short course at my local quilt shop about 6 years ago and then I was off and running. I have had a long fascination with handmade hexagon quilts, I enjoy making them a lot more than machine stitched quilts. To be honest I think it is all about the little bits, my crochet projects tend to be the same – lots of small pieces that then get joined together.

The first quilt that I ever made that was large enough to go on my bed was a non-traditional hexagon quilt that I made in about 6 weeks – this is a fairly short amount of time to complete such a large projects – I was procrastinating by not doing the study that I was supposed to be doing for my final year nursing exams. It all ended well – new quilt and a nursing degree!

This blue quilt had about 1500 hexagons (if I remember correctly) that were stitched together so quickly that I ended up with a repetitive strain injury in my thumb that took ages to get better.

My current obsession is this gorgeous quilt. It is called “Insanity” and was designed by Rhonda Pearce. I was lucky enough to find the pattern in a magazine – after a bit of searching I got a back issue off eBay.

The photo below I found on Flickr. The very generous photographer – Anne Brumley – has approved me to use it in this blog post. I think it shows the amazing texture of the quilt that is not seen on the magazine cover.

Insanity by Rhonda Pearce by Annie_Shea

The most amazing statistic about this quilt is that it is made from 10339 half inch hexagons. I am hoping to make each of the flower and diamond shapes in a different colour. The ‘white’ background for my quilt will be made from about 20 different whites – white, snow, cream, ecru, creme, arctic, vanilla, ivory etc – who knew there were so many?

My progress so far is:

Diamonds:  61 /158 sets

Flowers:  44/64 sets

Whites:  542/5389

Solid Border:  0/1068

Mixed Border: 896 /2234

I am going to document my progress and hopefully it won’t take forever to finish. In my next post I will put up some more photos of what I have stitched so far and how I am organising them.

Wish me luck!! 🙂