Seeds from Norway

In the Fall of 2008, when I went to my home country, Spain, to visit my family and friends, I received two half yards of fabric from my youngest son and his wife. They had gone to Norway that summer and found a quilt shop in Bergen. What better could they bring me as a souvenir? Here are two pictures where the little hexagons are made of those two fabrics: the first has little acorns with oak leaves and the second has brown leaves on a lighter background.

I had no sewing notions with me at all, so I thought I would wait to get back to start the quilt. Of course, I could not, so I purchased needles, thimble, scissors, thread, a set of templates and a couple of fat quarters to combine. I wanted to do something simple to showcase those beautiful fabrics. I did not know what the project was going to be. I had no plans at all, I just felt the need to start sewing and make something with those fabrics. I could not see them laying around while my hands were idle.

I decided to make these hexagons and triangles. The sides of them measure 1 1/4 inch, so they are pretty tiny.

With the templates, I drew the hexagons on  the acorns fabric and cut them with my new scissors, one at a time. Then, I drew the triangles on the yellow fabric (which, by the way is a Christmas fabric, but you cannot tell. I liked it because it has a bit of shine that casts some light to the rather dark value of the acorns fabric) and cut them. I hand pieced all the shapes together to form a big hexagon that has 61 small hexagons and 120 triangles.

Making that first big hexagon I had enough time to think about the different possibilities of this project. When I finished the second big hexagon, I knew the project was going to be a big quilt and I had decided that all the fabrics for the small hexagons would have leaves.

Although at the moment I always referred to this project as "the hexagons", the Seeds from Norway had already been sown.

To be continued...