HeLP for Hexie-aholics - 9/18/18

Sew...it was about 7pm last night when I realized it was the 17th. As in the day I should have posted HeLP for Hexie-aholics. Eek! Except I had been at a training in Canandaigua and it never dawned on me to schedule the post last week.

Oh, please forgive me, my hexie friends!!

Does it help that I was working on hexies while listening to the training? I worked on a different project than what I am going to share but hexies are hexies, right?! I am trying my best to only work on 2 hexie projects for the rest of the year. The first I worked on at training, a kaleidoscope doll quilt that will be my UFO Challenge project for hexie club this fall.

The other is Mr Serious. Zorro introduced the project back on 9/7/18. The purpose of the project is to make a 34" x 42" quilt for our next hexie club exhibit in September 2019. In the last post I was trying to chose from 3 photos. I actually tried converting all of these photos and a couple more but because Mr Serious was more of a compact photo when cropped I was able to get better detail. I know a lot of people liked the photo with me & Z but we would have just been blobs. Ick.

As you will recall, I started with the above photo.

The colors aren't nearly this dark...
it's more like my 12+ year old laptop needs replacing

I put the photo into EQ7 and got this. Fun! EQ assigned something like 60 colors.

There was no way I was investing in 60+ fabrics so I fiddled with the colors, more for shading purposes than actual/final colors and ended up with this. There are 2 reds, 2 golds, 1 brown, 1 black, 2 or 3 grays, 4 whites/creams, 1 lime green for the eyes and 1 pink for the nose. All are grunge fabrics. (Yes, I'm officially addicted!) I'm still not happy with the yellows I've found but I have time to keep looking.

I'm using this Fiskars (?) punch to cut my own 1/2" hexies from those stupid magazine cards. My friends are happy to give me their cards so now I have piles of them! Yes, 1/2" is kinda small but when I tried to increase the hexies, even to 3/4", I lost a lot of detail so it's worth it to stay small. Once I get into a rhythm it really isn't so bad.

I started with the eyes. With just 8 greens it was easy to get them out of the way and now I'm not likely to lose the cut pieces. I'm happy to admit this is the green that got rejected from the temp quilt - I knew I bought it for a reason =^..^=

This is how much I had stitched by Friday am.
Can you see that what I have blacked out by my knuckle corresponds with the stitched bits?

Luckily, the small town where I work has a fabulous print shop who will make color prints for 25cents per page. I had Rachel print the overall quilt and then this red quadrant. It's a bit hard to tell the 2 reds from each other in the print so I outlined them with a very fine blue sharpie to make my life easier. You can kind of see the difference in the reds in this photo of the stitched bits: as fat quarters the reds are quite different, as real life hexies a good enough contrast but in photos nearly the same. Frustrating to share with you guys but it looks good in person. You'll have to trust me or stop by to see it in person!

I'm not sure how I'll be differentiating all the black hexies when they are also outlined in black but I have time to figure that out. Most likely I'll change the black to a color unlike anything near it (blue, perhaps) so that I'll be able to black them out.

If I did the math correctly, this quilt has 2,327 hexies. Again with the math but if I do 10 hexies a day I'll have the top pieced in 3/4 of a year, leaving 1/4 of a year to quilt and bind it. I think that's doable. I know I won't be able to do 10 every day but I also know that I'll have meetings or DVD binge watching sessions to get a lot more done.

The safety pin marks my first hexie, which I've cut out
of the pattern as a reference point

Case in point! This was taken Sunday night and I've continued working since then...nearly twice as big in just 3 days.

Hopefully my crazy project will more than make up for my lack of remembering to post HeLP yesterday. I'm really looking forward to seeing your projects, whether they are as wild as mine or much more reasonable. Have a fantastic hexie day!

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