A Puff for Hexapuffs

Stephanie Dosen, the designer and blogger from Tiny Owl Knits, has come up with a new concept in knitted blankets with her Beekeeper's Quilt. Over the course of a year, she made about 500 "hexipuffs", or little double-sided, poly-filled, hexagon-shaped pieces knitted in the round, and then fastened them all together with quilt ties to make a quilt, as seen above.

This is a very portable project (at least until one gets to the assembly stage), would be a great way to use up odd balls of sock yarn, the maker can get artistic as she or he likes and play with the colour scheme or add embroidery to the hexipuffs, and because of the way this quilt is assembled, any hexipuffs that become stained or damaged can easily be removed and replaced. It could be made machine washable and dryable if only easy care yarn is used; otherwise dry cleaning is an option. And damn, would the resulting Beekeeper's Quilt be warm. This pattern is available for $5.50(USD) via its Ravelry page and there's also a knit-a-long for this design.

I think the main appeal of the Beekeeper's Quilt pattern for me personally is that it reminds me of the English paper piecing my grandmother taught me to do when I was a little girl. I still do some occasionally. I think nearly all my friends and family who sew have pincushions I pieced, and in a couple of cases when there was a family wedding in the offing I've been able to make a pincushion from scraps of the wedding and bridesmaid gowns being sewn for the wedding, which made a useful and special keepsake to give the bride in question. There is something very gratifying about making and piecing together all those cute little hexagon shapes, but my tolerance limit for making pincushions is usually two or three at a time, which I suspect means I shouldn't undertake to knit a Beekeeper's Quilt myself.