Hextra work...

Two posts in one week!  Something crazy must be going on!  Well, I have taken on a potentially crazy project.  I'm making a little quilt!  I want it to be useful for something, someday, but I don't have much time to finish it because it's going to be for a class final paper.  [I'll explain.]  So, I've decided on a crib size quilt which are typically 23"x46."  And now, on to the back story.

I'm in the middle of a Master's program in educational psychology.  It's interesting and I was actually excited to start school again after working for several years.  But, I'm a procrastinator.  It's not so much that I don't want to do the work.  I mean, I kind of don't, but I do like the topics and I like to think about them.  But I tend to let projects expand to fill all the available time.  I can be doing something else entirely, but in the back of my mind, I'm mulling over paper topics, ideas, themes, structure, whatever, until there's just barely enough time to write the darn thing.  Until that almost-panic moment, I feel like I can keep on just thinking, not actually doing the work.

This particular semester, I have two classes about which I'm not really that excited.  The course descriptions sounded intriguing, and enough of the initial classes were interesting enough that I didn't drop the courses.  But now, past midterm time (one has the midterm due and the other has the two article reviews...), I'm finding it hard to motivate myself to get to work!  This is especially sad because one of the classes is about student motivation... whoops.

The other class I'm not super excited about is a theory-based class about culture and intelligence.  Sounds like a cool class right?  The topic is definitely interesting, and some of the readings (not that I've been reading them all...) are also interesting.  But I have trouble with classes in which I can't find a practical application for the content.  This past Tuesday, as I zoned out a little in class, I kept thinking about my hexies and how I would much rather be making them than talking about our individual definitions of wisdom.  The more I zoned out thought about it, the more I felt like I could use my hexies as an analogy for some theories of intelligence we've discussed.  I had the idea that if I made a hexie quilt and then wrote a paper about how the quilt and the process of making it is analagous to theories of intelligence, I would be able to make the course content meaningful to me (and motivate myself to get to work!).  Longer story short, the professor likes the idea, so I'm making a quilt. 

I am taking full advantage of the opportunity to incorporate my crafting into course work.  So, naturally I started a pinboard of all the ideas and resources I'm collecting with regard to hexies and quilting.  One resource I found was this handy hex-quilt calculator.  You tell it how big your hexies are and how big you want the finished product to be and it tells you how many hexies you will need.  Very useful.  Here's what it gave me:

See that? Only 410 hexies!  Plus 30 half hexies... but I think I can do it.  I've already got 74 done:

I'm also happy to say that I actually spent some time doing research today and also managed to read a few articles!  Hopefully this little quilty pleasure project will be just the thing to keep me motivated through the end of the semester!