It's been a while since I've mentioned this wonderful treasure that came my way earlier in the year. Since you last saw it I have been working away at "consolidating". Getting all the unfinished edges finished, sewing lots of little while hexagons to add to the edges to get to a clean starting point, taking our endless paper hexagons so I have templates to paper piece around, sewing lots of colourful flowers so I have a stock to begin adding in my own contributions. You can see them making rainbow in the box below
So, having got the point where there is a boundary of white around what has been done so far, I was advised that it is usual to have some way of marking where one maker ceased and another began. This struck me as an excellent idea; the piecing that has been done so far is so fine and I am trying to achieve the same quality, but my aesthetic with colour is bound to differ from hers. So, without doing something too obvious that would intrude on the rhythm of the overall design (assuming I do actually finish it), I have decided to run a single line of stem stitch around the white edges to show where her flowers end and mine begin. You can see it below, skirting round the purple and blue and green, marking the transition that spans 13 years and a whole generation; the originator of this was my Mum's generation. It makes me think of edges and boundaries and maps, I don't quite know why.
I am still stitching every day, amongst all the other projects on the go. A quiet task that can be inventive, when choosing, cutting and stitching the fabrics for the flowers, or quietly undemanding, when stitching white on white; hexagons around paper, hexagons to other hexagons, or rhythmic stem stich to mark the place one stopped and another started. Honouring her work as I move forward with my own.
