Last weekend I attended a quilting retreat that was put on by the Central Jersey Modern Quilt Guild. It was a wonderful experience, and this was my third year in attendance at this event.

It turned out that I was the only person in attendance who did not happen to bring along a sewing machine, but I was pleased to see that one other attendee brought her Glorious Hexagons work with her, and that she spent some time working on it. She is using Kaffe Fassett fabrics exclusively, so the feeling of her work is very different from mine. I loved seeing the beautiful blocks she had created and the way they worked together as she was assembling them. She had put together the entire quilt design on a design wall before coming to the retreat and was working on assembling portions of the design. I definitely must obtain some Kaffe Fassett prints and must do another quilt using his wonderful bright colors.

It has been a long time since I have shown the overall progress of my work. The last time I did I only had 15 large hexagons to show. Now I have 26 of them. I took the opportunity to place them randomly on the floor at this retreat. Here they are.

I also took the opportunity to lay out the single hexagons I have made so far that have not yet found a home in a large hexagon. Here are those hexagons.

Having taken these photographs I came to to the realization that I especially enjoy seeing the green and blue stars in the centers of my large hexagons. That inspired me to spend my remaining time at the treat putting together a few green and blue hexagons to serve as centers for large hexagons.

Below are the hexagons assembled during the retreat. Some of them are duplicates owing to the fact that they are Kim blocks cut from six layer stacks.

The above blocks will be introduced individually in a future blog post.

It  might be a little egocentric to think that anyone really cares what goes on in my head, Be that as it may, to explain that phenomena is exactly why I blog. I do it to share my process as I tackle a particular project.

The other day I found myself wanting to put together a big hexagon composed of blocks that had a bit of green in them. I had a limited number of blocks of that nature and found myself feeling that my proposed arrangement just wasn’t cutting it. One of my blocks seemed out of place. It was drawing too much attention to itself for a block on the periphery of a big hexagon.

Which block feels out of place here?

It is the one to the far left of the configuration. It just seems to be “trying too hard”. It wants to be in the center of a big hexagon, not along the periphery.

I decided to pull it out. This meant that I needed to go back to one of my layer stacks from the panel fabric to find a cut that would make a block that would play well with the others. To use a musical metaphor, I wanted a block that was willing to sing backup.

I searched for an area of the panel that had some green. I found a slim area of green between two honking big horse heads, and there I made my cut.

Above you can see a basted kite piece inserted into the space from which it had come,

and the resulting Doris block attempting to hide in its natural environment.

Another delightful Doris is born,

and auditions for her part.

Here is the big hexagon sewn completely together and photographed on the front porch in my usual staging area. The audition photograph above that was taken on the back deck. I needed to do that because the morning sun makes taking photographs on the front porch impossible. It’s good to know now that I have a place to take photographs regardless of the time of day during sunlight hours.

I didn’t want the block I had pulled to feel rejected, so I set about immediately making it the center of attention in its own big hexagon

The two large hexagons above are numbers 25 and 26. Up to this point I have only displayed big hexagons 1 through 15, so I definitely have some blogging to do to get the rest of these pieces out there.