It's time.

After Round 4 (or is it 5?) of battling with insurance companies this morning, I decided that today it was finally time to get back to the project I started before our surprise remodel. I spent my afternoon working on a felting project that I'll get around to writing and photographing later, but I think the rest of the weekend will be spent on my new quilt project.

Finishing the hexagon quilt left me pretty stoked about this whole ridiculous quilting thing, but wanting something more simple, preferably with seams longer than 3 inches. So a few weeks ago, I picked up a bunch of sale fat quarters and started sketching.

I'm still trying to get away from my fear of patterns, so I went wild with black, white, and blue prints. I liked the idea of a simple brick quilt, but wanted something a little skewed, so I my rows are being cut at 45 degrees and pieced diagonally starting at opposite corners. I also liked the idea of a project that used as as little waste as possible, so in addition to my 3x6 bricks, there are 3 x random length bricks thrown in for good measure. So far my leftover scraps consist of two 1x1 squares and a few 1/4" strips.

I swear to God, it's the last blue thing I'm sewing for a while. Seriously.

So here we are again.

Once again, it's November and I'm lagging on this whole blogging thing. I'm usually decent at the outset before eventually petering out, but this time I seem to have failed to even make it out of the starting gate.

Thing is, it's been that sort of a week. Actually, scratch that-- it's been that sort of two weeks. Two Sundays ago, my condo flooded due to a malfunctioning washer next door, dumping gallons of water under the adjoining walls into my kitchen, stairwell, and living room. We got a lot cleaned up that night, but it took four days, a cleanup crew, seven industrial fans, a dehumidifier the size of my stove, and the removal of half my downstairs flooring before everything was finally dry.

...and that was the easy part. Week 2 has been the hard part-- dealing with insurance companies. I generally expect insurance companies to do their job-- wearing us down to avoid having to release money-- but the run-around we've been getting has exceeded even my already-low standards. Luckily, I've armed myself with a trusty notebook full of info-- every name, every phone number, and every single scrap of documentation that might be remotely relevant. I'm also really lucky to have a couple of friends with insurance backgrounds who've let me pick their brains when needed, so I feel well-prepared for our fight with bullshit bureaucracy.

The whole thing, along with a couple of related tensions and frustrations, left me pretty worn out and depressed. I was too tired to do much for Halloween, which bummed me out even further. So after a week of eating my feelings and a beer or three, I went back to my preferred method of coping-- following through with my restoration plan, reminding myself that this will also pass, and making lists of the things I have to be happy and grateful for.

Right now I'm glad to be snuggled under my finished-at-long-last hex quilt. My finished size ended up being slightly bigger than throw-sized at 65"x65". I was originally planning on making a twin-sized piece, but after months of sewing I looked at my quilt where it was pinned on the wall and finally admitted that if I had to sew another hexagon I was going to hurt someone. "A throw would get more use anyway," I told myself while shoving 150 leftover hexes into my fabric trunk, and thusfar it's turned out to be true.

Obsession

Since I gave up my fruitless fight for a decently snowy winter, I've been aching for spring. Technically, it already is spring, but the Northwest has a different sort of definition for that word. Here, "spring" means rain, a day of sunbreaks followed by rain, some temperatures that dip down into the forties, a tiny bit of the snow we didn't get in winter, then more rain. Now that we're getting into May, things are finally starting to warm up and get sunnier, but it's still a Northwest spring so things can change quite quickly.

Spring is a tricky little bastard that delights in showing me a ten-minute flash of sunlight, and like the gullible idiot I am I think that means it's warm enough to forgo the fingerless gloves that have been a daily staple for the last six months. Within moments the rug is pulled out from under me and the giant dark clouds roll on in. Some people think they look like bunnies, some see dragons, and the truly odd see the face of President Nixon. Me, I see a giant hand pointing as Nature laughs at me.

This is also typically the time of year when I start to go off the rails a tiny bit and, judging by the attitudes of the people I encounter throughout my day, I'm definitely not the only one. There are plenty of places in the world where the elements are more extreme and harsh, but the Northwest requires its own special sort of endurance. A mini-vacation to Disneyland(!) in early March and a visit from my sister helped stave off my usual early spring depression, but now I find myself aching for color and light and skirts and warmth and bikes and mojitos.

I think that's how I ended up on this hexagon quilt thing. I had been thinking about starting one a few months ago. I went as far as going over to my mom's to pull out the flower garden quilt my great-great-grandmother made to study it a bit, and buy a hexagon cutting template. After a couple of days, I shelved the idea in favor of sitting on my couch and knitting squares for my sock yarn blanket.

However, as the weather got wetter and my patience for grayness grew thinner, I thought about it again. Before I knew what hit me, I was at my local JoAnn buying a couple dozen fat quarters in shades of blue and green, and making dozens upon dozens of hexagons. Now, I find myself stealing every moment I can to go up to my sewing room and sew just a few more seams.

I'm foregoing paper piecing methods in favor of machine sewing based on the Lady Harvatine tutorial on the subject. When I consulted my mother, she was reasonably certain that my great-great grandmother never used the paper piecing method on her quilts. Frankly, if machine sewing was good enough for Kate, it's good enough for me.

Given how many hexes I cut out, this quilt is going to end up being about twin size, but I'm envisioning large picnics and snuggling under it in camping tents.