Paper Pieces: “Rolling” Your Own

You can buy pre-cut hexagons papers for English Paper Piecing from a number of sources. You can get them from Paper Pieces on the web. You can buy them at your local quilt store, the Pennington Quilt Works in my case, in bags of varying amounts. While paper piecing goes more quickly to have someone do this work of making paper pieces for you in advance, I think it is a waste of money. It is so easy to “roll your own”. Ummmm, I mean is that it is so easy to CUT your own, but being a child of the sixties I couldn’t resist the phraseology.

I like my paper pieces firm enough to offer support to my fabric, yet flexible enough for easy bending when it is time to join larger shapes or rows together. Therefore, I use a 20 pound all purpose office supply paper that I obtain from Staples. I may try a heavier paper at some time, but I am satisfied with 20 pound paper currently. The pre-cut manufactured papers I have tried are quite a bit heavier, and I find that they are not as easy to bend. Therefore, they are not as comfortable to work with.

I found a nice pdf file for cutting one inch hexagons at the Texas Freckles web site. I am offering a link to the main page of the web site. I urge you to explore the entire site, and then click on “Downloads and Patterns” to find the hexagon pdf. Since I have printed out many pages of hexagons using this pdf, the least I can do is encourage traffic to the site rather than just a link to the pdf file.

Ordinarily I print my hexagon shapes on blank paper. But today I got the brilliant idea of recycling my daily todo list from my husband. I am retired and my husband still works part time. He enjoys a clean and tidy house, whereas I simply to do not care about such things. I don’t even SEE the dirt and clutter around me. I’ve always been that way, and I am unashamed, might I say even proud? But I am clearly the Oscar to my husband’s Felix. Rather than have this become a bone of contention, we have set up a routine whereby I receive a list of things to do each day he is at work at least. I have the pleasure of checking off the completed items, and my husband has the pleasure of having the tasks completed that might otherwise have gone undone. Now, before anyone comments to offer sympathy because my husband provides me with a daily todo list, let me make it clear that he does MORE than his share of housework. I find the use of the todo list to be mutually beneficial. I take pleasure in checking things off, and I am pleased that he makes his needs known in a way that works for both of us. That is far superior to having him let his disappointment over my substandard housekeeping fester. I’m clearly the one with the problem, not him. So it’s all good.