Happy Mother’s Day!

Even with the new baby chaos, I did not let Mother’s Day sneak up on me this year.  I had grand plans for making a couple of small, hand-pieced gifts.  Like these sweet little sachets, a free project from Lark :

I made them- the pattern is easy, quick and well-written.  Then I tried to find dried lavender to fill them with.  You would think someone in the entire Dallas/Fort Worth metroplex carries dried lavender. Not that I could find.  (If you know of somewhere that does, please let me know!  I can still overnight these little guys!)  So instead, I bought apple cider sachets at Bed, Bath and Beyond, thinking I could cut them open and fill the tea bags.  They smelled wonderful and cinnamony in the store.  I got them home, left them in the laundry room overnight, and woke up the next morning to a house filled with fake apple scent.  Literally, the whole house smelled like JoAnn Fabrics at Christmastime.  Yuck.  So these are likely to be a post-Mother’s Day surprise.

The other day, I stumbled upon a hexagon book I hadn’t seen before.  I’ve been on pins and needles waiting for it to arrive in the mail, and it arrived yesterday.  Happy dance!  It’s all vintage hexagon patterns, and they are AMAZING.  So much inspiration!

I loved seeing some of the classic names for blocks.  (Like what we call Texas Star, they call the Boutonniere block.) Some of them were so intricate, it puts our modern hexagons to shame.  One of the best parts of the book is seeing the pictures of the original patterns as they were printed in the Kansas City Star newspaper.  They printed the templates with the number and color of each needed for a block, and a drawing of the completed block.  That’s it.  Yardage and piecing sequence was all up to the quilter, I suppose.  Sure makes our contemporary patterns look wordy!

I’ll definitely be posting more about this book as I incorporate the blocks into projects.  So many ideas, so little time. . . .