Turkey day and beyond

We had a truly pleasant Thanksgiving--really good food and time to catch up with relatives we don't get to see very often! We alternate holidays annually between my family and DH's family--always makes me wish we could clone ourselves, 'cause you want to see everyone, but it just isn't possible.

I am trying to teach my kids to take their holidays one at a time--honestly, poor Thanksgiving gets some serious short shrift in this day and age!! Christmas music started on the radio about two weeks ago (heck! decorations were out in the stores before Halloween was even here!). Everything is soooooo commercialized and geared towards the almighty dollar, it is sad. You could not have been paid me to go out and shop today--no thanks. Not interested in crowds and people rushing around with manic agendas.

So, today I stayed in and worked on the wedding quilt and made some big progress! Over the last few days, I worked on making the last 100 hexagons--finished them up this morning and then made my stacks of color-related hexagons. I had to laugh because the book shows about 5 stacks, I had over 20!! My stacks were very scientifically named, too--there was the "bird" stack and the "bird parts" stack, the "baby poo brown" stack, the "broccoli" stack........ I did have some normal ones, too--chrysanthemum stacks of various colors, poppy stack, and assorted leaf stacks. I literally worked on arranging hexagons all day from about 11 a.m. onward (with a lunch break) until about 6:30 p.m. It was addicting. I set up my mobile design wall in the dining room-- here was about the midway point:

It was easier at the beginning (of laying out the hexagons) than at the end--sometimes making transitions from area to area wasn't too easy. I wouldn't have believed it, but I got my first draft of the entire quilt layout up! Some areas still need tweaking, but here is a picture of draft layout number one. (I took this laying on the dining room floor to try and get all of it in the frame.)

Is it perfect? (snort!!!!) No. But it looks much better than I had hoped it would! I'm going to look at it again tomorrow with fresh eyes and see if I can't smooth it out a little. I am using around 200 of the 210 hexagons I made, so there is not much wiggle room in how to utilize the hexagons I have. The hexagons that aren't getting used (so far anyway) are the "baby poo brown" ones. I have an idea to make them into a cool pillow with tassels (well, it'll be cool as long as I don't tell my brother and sister-in-law the pillow was made from the baby poo brown assortment of hexagons!).

If I ever make one of these again, I will have a much better idea of what kind of fabric to select--this one seems pretty challenging. I will probably need to find some red/wine solid to fill in around a few edge spots, and I'll need backing and binding fabrics. Lucky for me I have a $100 gift certificate to a real nice quilt shop out by my in-law's house. Now I need to come up with a name for this quilt.........something fitting for two very happy newlyweds.

I also need to start doing some Christmas decorating--the kids are very excited that we can (finally!) start getting ready for the next holiday. Maybe we'll pull out the decorations tomorrow!!