Recently I wrote about how projects pivot when life throws you a curveball. I had a great conversation in store recently with a customer that said she was in finishing-mode where what gave her the greatest joy, and also occupied just the right amount of brainpower that she could give her crafting at the moment, was pulling out unfinished projects and working them through completion. I found myself in a similar state.

In addition to the random addition of cutesy felt embroidery notions cases that I suddenly found myself working on when a family member ended up in a month long hospital stay, it seemed I just didn’t have the mojo to knit any larger projects. But I couldn’t take the embroidery project along to other parts of my day that usually were occupied with stop-and-go knit time, so suddenly I was dusting off a project I started in July 2014: my Beekeeper’s Quilt. This pattern was released in 2011 by tiny owl knits, and this odyssey of a knit was quite a sensation at that time as it was a wonderful way to use up thousands of metres of fingering-weight leftovers. I was inspired by a friend who at that time was hurriedly knitting one for her daughter, a high school senior, before she went off to college and I thought what a nice idea to adopt. I was pregnant with my first-born, which should have left me PLENTY of time.

This has been a start-and-stop project for me where I find myself pre-occupied  for weeks or months of feverishly knitting hexipuffs [as they became known], and then throwing them in a giant glass bowl to be forgotten again for another year or two. Additionally I’ve been collecting oodles of solid and tonal mini skeins of finger-weight hand dyed yarn; which now turn out to be more than a lifetime supply, and certainly more than enough for one very large blanket. I had calculated that if I wanted a twin/double sized quilt it would take over 600 hexipuffs and luckily I was certainly not in a hurry.

With my latest change of fibre arts pace I find myself once again drawn to this project. And currently I am all-in; I’ve confirmed I have knit over 300 to date, am finding that over the past two weeks I was able to knit another 50. So if I continued at full speed, I could have this finished before the end of the summer. But honestly who knows how long this quest will occupy me at this junction? However, I have decided to also work on starting to connect some of these into the spectrum of colours I have been dreaming about, grouping 7 puffs into tonals hexi-flower and I have to say this is starting to really move my needle. Each hexi takes about 40 minutes, and I get the thrill of starting and finishing mini-projects without any real worries about making mistakes as quirks within each puff just becomes another brick of the mosiac! So here goes… taking on this omnibus project one hexi at a time and we’ll see where this takes me. Since my first born is now midway through high school currently I’ve got an 26 month deadline!

What’s moved YOUR needles in unexpected ways lately??