My next big hexagon quilt.

I have to tell you, when I got done with my Grandmother's Flower Garden hexagon quilt I was at a loss as to what project to have in my traveling hexagon box. Not to mention, what project to work on at home in the evenings watching TV. Well, after a couple of days of sitting around twiddling my thumbs, I decided to dig out an old project and make it work.

What I found, while digging around, were 17 diamond shapes that I had made sometime between the years 1997 and 2002. Each diamond has three small flowers with a solid yellow center. The center flower is surrounded with a white print and a neutral finishes off the diamond. Next question to ask myself was, do I have any of the white fabric? I thought I had but, where! Good news, I found the white, almost a whole bolt of it. Considering it was bought before I opened the shop I have wondered where I got it.

While looking for the diamonds I found a cigar box with precut squares in groups of six for the flowers. It's nice to have a head start with the flowers. Then I started wondering if I still had the soft yellow for the centers. The first thing I found was a small piece that would cut about 100 squares. Not enought! Last night I just happened to glance in the fabric stash cupboards and guess what I saw, yup, a great big hunk of the yellow. One more ingredient ready to go.

 

 Then it was on to the neutrals. My original plan was to have each hexagon using a different neutral. This must have been on my mind when I've gone shop hopping with friends. I found a bunch of  fat quarters in the cupboard, also. Add to that a group of 2-1/2" strips of neutrals from Blank Quilting and the 2-1/2" strips that I received in an exchange with the Mississippi Valley Quilters Guild, that will give me a very good start. In fact, I think I will have enough

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 So now we come to the design. My original idea was to lay them next to each other. I laid out the 17 finished blocks and said, "No, I didn't like that." Then I laid them out another way, I didn't like that either.

Then I thouht about laying them out and putting a new diamond between them. That appealed to me so I went into my EQ7 and came up with the new idea. 

I like this a lot. The new diamonds will have only two flowers but I will be adding three green leaves. The green will be all the same fabric. The neutral border will be made scrappy using all of the neutrals. This will be a combination of planned and scrappy. Always my favorite. 

This is 1/4 of the quilt. I was too lazy to color a whole quilt!