The Meadery and Men-An-Tol

I've been working on The Meadery. I had a piece of cotton home decorator fabric that I planned on using for the centre medallion of the quilt.

Something about it wasn't working for me. First the grey background wasn't quite right for the honeycomb and the medallion was too "solid". By that I mean there was too much of one thing. As I was pondering what to do I recalled a megalith in Cornwall (the idea of this quilt is to reflect my Cornish heritage). The megalith is called Men-an-Tol which in the Cornish language means hole stone. You can read more this granite wonder about it here.

Many (many) years ago I visited Men-an-Tol with family members. They told me that in bygone days women would pass their children through the hole to prevent rickets. I was about to set off on a seven month back-packing trip with a friend so we decided to crawl through the hole ourselves. And guess what? Neither of us developed rickets! But I digress.

I thought that if I removed the middle of my medallion that the medallion would take on the appearance of the circular stone and it could represent Men-An-Tol in my quilt. Since the name of my quilt is The Meadery it seemed appropriate to reverse applique a bee skep in the middle.The next step is to trim away the outer fabric and applique the whole thing to a creamy background.

I continue to work on two large diamonds for this quilt and they will flank the medallion. Men-An-Tol has two upright stones and the diamonds will be a fine representation of those pillars.

Men-An-Tol also has a third stone that has fallen and is at the foot of one of the uprights. You can see it at the base of the upright stone on the right. So I've begun work on a third unit that will represent that fallen stone. There will be multiple rounds of hexagons but this is a start. And the bee is front and centre! My hope is that as I add the next rounds with darker fabrics that a pale cream wheel with spokes will appear.

I've been working on producing a pattern for my Value Proposition Hexagon Quilt. The block patterns are available free of charge on my blog but I am going to put them all together with detailed instructions for English paper piecing and a new and simplified method of putting the quilt top together. The pattern will be available on Craftsy. I was finally able to get a better pictures of the finished quilt top for the cover of my pattern.

Mind you I had some "help". Gump and Jinx decided it would be fun to get behind the quilt and wrestle! What is it with cats and quilt I ask you? It looks like the quilt has been caught by a breeze but in fact it is Gump's mighty tail that is holding up the quilt! Once the wrestling started the quilt fell down! Good think those cats are cute otherwise I would be clipping their tail feathers!

That's it for today. Until I post again, happy sewing!

Karen H