A Hexie too far

Are you the kind of quilting overachiever that sometimes looks at your work and says...well that's not right...

 

I am.  And, I say it all smarmy, too.  With my lips curled up and looking down my nose like Mary Astor stepping in dog poo.  Kind of offended...how day my work not come out perfect!  Bad work.

 

I almost didn't show you this because some of you are going to think I'm complaining about nothing.  It's been together for a week, while I tried to figure out what exactly went wrong.  And, yes, it's pretty.  But, as usual, I got too symmetrical.  I started adding hexies, thinking I could make it better and better.  And, it got a symmetrical flat line along the bottom and there are hexies in strange places, poking out, all around.  It's time for a very pointy pair of snips to remove about 10 of those green ones.

This is another example why you shouldn't quilt and do drugs.  This is the hand project I worked on last Friday after the oral surgery.  I worked on it til my hands ached, sitting in a dining room chair, all day, sewing, while Rob recuperated in the bedroom.  Happy as a clam.  High as a kite.  Adding green hexies with abandon. 

The flower arrangement I'm going for is not symmetrical.  The right lack of symmetry will give it a tension that will draw viewers in.  Like a twang on a guitar string. 

Here is where I started, before I began making more green hexies.  Sorry it's so dark.  I laid it out on the dining table, on a dark table cloth.  But, you get the picture.  That lack of symmetry has its own energy.  This needed maybe 5 hexies...or maybe none. 

So, I'm going back to something closer to this.  The whole thing is going to get mounted on a white background, then it will get a batik border...one of those multi-colored batiks that I loved until I found out they were very hard to work with because they don't know what color to be.  And, then another white border.  And, then I'm going to quilt the crap out of it, filling the background with fern fronds...like a feather, but with a leaf shape coming off the stem.  I'm hoping it will look like these are growing in a bed of invisible ferns. 

Or, it will make a very nice dog blanket.

Have a great Friday.  I'm leading a very big, very long meeting today.  A lot of it is going to be other people agreeing with or challenging my recommendations (as many of the 235 recommendations as we can discuss in three hours, anyway).  Patience.  Patience.  I'm gonna need a lot of patience. 

Please send patience. 

Patience. 

Because, believe it or not, I'm not always right.

But, damn it's hard to hear it from somebody else.

Lane