I was intrigued by Martha Thompson’s technique, outlined in her book and shown on Simply Quilts, for taking hexagons and turning them into what she calls “swirligigs”. This is one of the patterns from her book, though I used several colors of hexagons where she used a single one. I happened to have some hand-dyes in my stash, so I used them with a background that I also already had and came up with this piece:
This was a fast, fun project. It took only parts of four days from start to finish! Since the hexagons-turned-swirligigs seem to have a lot of movement in them, I quilted them with a swirling pattern to underscore that movement. Here is a detail of the quilting:
The little quilt measures 21″ across the narrower dimension and 24 1/2″ across the wider one, and I machine pieced and machine quilted it, finishing in October, 2004