A Hexagonal Update, In Cotton

Ever since writing this post, I have been finding it harder and harder to remain patient over my cotton hexagons! 

I love that they are 100% cotton, no acrylic in sight for these, and I love the thought that they can be used soon-ish, when the weather cools and the evenings are not so hot. I love the pattern, and how quickly these simple-yet-intricate hexagons fly off the hook. I want so much to work on it some more!!

I have only one part-ball of yarn left though (in Nectarine), so I am rationing my cotton hexagon making. Trying to eek out my hexagon time is made easier with Pinterest, looking for other people’s blankety makes with this hexagon – something I have been doing ever since I first discovered this pattern.

One of my favourites is on a lovely blog called by Haafner. I found her blanket here, and fell in love with her colours so much that I immediately decided that I must make a second cotton blanket as soon as I can afford to order more yarn!! She used mainly Drops Paris cotton for her blanket, and the colours are delicious! This yarn is also not expensive, so it won’t break the bank to order it – always a bonus!

Back to her blanket again, I also love the border she chose; I love how the pattern of it reflects the pattern of the hexagons. And I love her half hexes to square it off all the way around. Definitely something to remember for when mine gets to that stage – and I managed to find charts for both types of half! (The pin links to a pattern for a dress, if you fancy a dress made out of these hexies…) The only thing I would try to do differently to Haafner is to finish the blanket edge in such a way that I don’t end up with a gap at the corner to fill with extra stitching (scroll down through her pictures and you will see what I mean).

Anyway, as you can imagine, all this browsing of gorgeous pictures did waste some time, however it did nothing to calm my enthusiasm for working on my own blanket. So I simply had to have a play around with it some more…

First of all, I decided to have a go at joining a few together. I experimented with some lacy joins, but I just couldn’t come up with anything that I liked. In my mind I really wanted to go with something more interesting than a plain join-on-the-go with trebles, but in reality that was the join that I felt worked best.

So I joined together one hex of each colour, just to see how they would look. I didn’t darn in the ends of the cream though, so if I need to rearrange then I can do so easily. I love how they look!!!!

This little bit of playing around kept me happy for a bit, but then I was itching to see how close to having a blanket I am – and of course this is useful, as I will need to know how much yarn to order when I get my first pay cheque! I spread them out on my bed to see, and as these are quite large hexagons (including the border, they are 21cm side to side, and 23 point to point) they did cover quite a lot of it!

Excuse the poor photo - it was dark when I took it so no natural light.

I have a total of 34 hexagons at the moment, and I don’t think it will take too many more to have a full blanket’s worth of them. I think I'd like to add in another colour on the bluey-greeny side of things too, to balance it out a bit (as there are 3 pinky/orangey colours). I have narrowed down the additional options to:

 

Apple

Delta

or maybe Purple

It’s exciting to think of being so close, although frustrating to think I still have to wait before I can order more cotton… Still, good things come to those who wait, and this also gives me a chance to decide which Drops Paris colours I want for Cotton Hexagons version 2!