Two More Hexathon Blocks!

I hope your week is going well.  We are having some lovely weather and I've been a bit distracted from my stitching by a local birding survey project.  Monday afternoon, I spotted two very exciting birds that I rarely see -- black-billed cuckoo and golden-winged warbler. 

This is a picture of the warbler from allaboutbirds.com  It might have been only the second time I've seen one in 55 years of birding!!  Very exciting!!

 

But I am keeping up with Barbara Brackman's Morris Hexathon!

 

I fiddled with my templates for about 30 minutes trying to decide which ones might work for block #17 which Barbara named "Folly".  My favorite folly in England is the "temple of Apollo" at Stourhead -- if you've seen the version of Pride and Prejudice with Kiera Knightley, it's the location of the big argument between Lizzie and Darcy in the rain. 

   Finally, I relented and paper pieced them.  In the end, it was the easiest approach.  Since I have been reintroduced to the skill for several of the blocks used for the #smorgasblocks follow along, it worked out well.

 

I copied the pattern onto light weight paper, cut it apart and pieced six of these units. 

The trickiest part was trimming them without cutting off the seam allowances -- there was lots of self-talk for the time it took to do that.

I left the paper in place until the block was completely assembled.

And here's the finished block -- I'm pleased with how crisp it looks!

Block #18, Parquetry was another easy one and I was able to use template G47, a half hexagon.

After I cut the pieces, I auditioned two layouts and decided to replace the brown dot -- the value between the blue and brown was too close and I wanted one of them to be darker so the design of the block was more obvious.

At this point, I had planned to insert a little video of me piecing the units below but either I deleted it in the process of transferring it from the camera to the computer or like so many things, it's hiding somewhere on the hard drive which I haven't discovered quite yet. 

So we'll try it another day.

 

This brown is enough darker in value that I was happier with the results.

It's not as outstanding as the example in Barbara blogpost -- you should look at it as the fussy cuts are impressive!

Since my design wall is currently empty, I experimented with some layouts.

The empty spaces will be filled with large hexagons probably a print or several prints. 

There are still 8 blocks to go and I'm looking forward to translating some of these into large size blocks to include as ideas in my hexagon piecing workshops.

I might even keep them as a loose set for a while to use in workshops for a demonstration tool for designing settings?  What do you think of that idea?

 

Mary