Sunshine in the garden

It's a beautiful day here today, and actually warm instead of that it-looks-gorgeous-outside-but-dare-to-step-outside-in-your-nightclothes-and-you'll-be-sorry kind of sunshine. So to celebrate I took the sunshine quilt into the garden for a little bit of sewing time.

It's now around the 40" square mark, ignoring the few extra hexagons sticking out along one side and a square of perhaps 20 hexagons waiting to be attached, and I feel I've learned a few things in my first forays into hand sewing and paper piecing:

1. I love it. There's something enormously satisfying about hand sewing (as well as the fact that I love the finished look), and it has the extra advantage of being incredibly portable
2. I really hope I like hand quilting as much as I like hand piecing
3. I actually almost didn't want to use my machine last week for finishing the piecing of another quilt. I am gradually rethinking my Bernina love and wondering whether I can get away with something a bit cheaper if I don't want to use it very often for quilting, but more for clothes sewing and the odd bit of piecing. Then I can justify a serger too, right?
4. When paper piecing, there's always something new to do if you get bored - tired of basting hexagons? Start piecing them! Tired of piecing? Go cut some more 3.5" squares from yellow fabric! Tired of that? Cut more paper hexagon templates! It probably says something about me that I get bored that easily...
5. I want to make this a good sized double quilt. All right, I know I said more than once that I was going to stop when I got bored, but now it's big enough now for me to see the potential and I really want to have it on our bed, which has never had its own quilt (I have ambitions of it having a whole selection one day)
6. I can really see this quilt ageing nicely and looking just as lovely as the colours begin to fade in years to come
7. I want to quilt it in perle cotton, which is much thicker than quilting cotton, so the quilting (also in yellow, I think) stands out just a little bit more on the front and is a real statement on the back
8. I'm thinking about backing it with a few big pieces of blue fabric, nothing remotely fancy, and letting my amateur attempts at hand quilting take centre stage
9. Hexagon sewing is seriously wasteful on the fabric front if you don't cut your fabric carefully. I started sewing with 3.5" squares, then realised I prefer the reduced bulk of sewing with actual hexagons (i.e. 1.5" hexagons plus a 1/4-3/8" seam allowance, rather than a square), so started cutting 3.5" squares and chopping the corners off. This results in a lot of dead fabric. I'm planning on ordering a set of hexagon templates for finishing this one and/or starting the next hexagon quilt (what am I thinking? Another one?) and although the fabric cutting time will be much greater (squares make for seriously quick cutting) I think it will be worth it for the reduced fabric consumption. Inevitably the small shapes (and therefore large amount of seaming) means heavy fabric use anyway, but I figure I may as well try to minimise it a bit.
10. I've already used the same amount of cotton I would expect to get a good sized single sized quilt from. See what I mean about using a lot of fabric?
11. I have about six WIPs that are all being ignored in favour of this quilt top. Whoops.
12. I want to entirely hand make this quilt, but I'm wondering whether hand sewing binding on both sides (I always hand sew the back) is really worth it for the pleasure of being able to say that no machine has ever touched this quilt. We'll see.

I just realised that if you stuck Teddy in that picture (and I would have if he wasn't at the childminder. Almost any picture can be improved by the addition of a cute toddler) and possibly a loaf of rising bread, you'd be looking at the things that occupy most of the average day here at the moment. Life is being very nice to us just now, I feel.