Step 6: Make HOW MANY hexagons?!

I have now made 248 hexagons.

Ta daa!

I have them all lined up in a large bowl for Halloween Candy.  (I like the monsters on it, so I'm OK with using this bowl for the foreseeable future to hold my work in progress.)  They look rather substantial in there, all squeezed into a ring. Two hundred and forty-eight hexagons.  And soon, I'll have 325.  That's something for a month of on-and-off quilting!

Care to guess how many hexagons I need for my quilt?

Nope, more than that.

According to this VERY useful calculator, I need 1165 hexagons to make a quilt for my Queen size bed. And that's just for the quilt TOP.  If I wanted to make the whole thing out of hexagons (top + the sides that drape down the bed), I'd need 2094.

Now that I have purchased/traded enough fabric to cut out 325 squares of different(ish) fabric, and now that I have made more than 200 hexagons, I have a better idea of the process and what the finished quilt might look like. And I've been thinking about how it would make my room look if I used it as a bedspread type quilt.  I am confident that I will like the final product, but not confident that I will want it to be the focal point of my bedroom.  Because that's what it would be, right? All spread out flat on my large bed in a (presumably) not so large room?

So for the sake of my wallet, my lower back (fabric cutting marathon = owie!), and the actual use I expect to get out of the finished quilt, I have decided to change my plan slightly.  My goal is no longer to make a quilt for my bed out of this project.  I now aim to make a throw-blanket-type-quilt. The kind you would drape on the back of a couch when you're not snuggled up in it on a rainy Fall afternoon. The kind that might have matching pillows (another project!). And the kind that would only take 745 hexagons to make.

I feel good about this decision. I can't wait to see how the change ups my percentages in the progress bars on my blog!