Octagons and hexies

Yesterday's progress on the octagon quilt.  Slow work, but very relaxing.  The little black octagon is already sewn to the large square, and now needs to be attached to the side of the little orange flower one.  I'm thinking that I should first attach another large square first.  This is easy easy work; the hard part is figuring out in which order I should sew these guys together.

Third block in progress.  That skinny little needle is nasty.  I keep poking myself with it.  No blood, yet, but any second now.

Octagonny

Just because I don't have enough EPP (English Paper Piecing) going on, I had to start a new project the other day.  The Starry Menace is resting before I finish up a few more blocks, and Hexified is in process of being appliqued.

 

So, heaven forbid I should finish up some knitting or crochet; nope, I had to play with paper pieces.

I had all the fixings to make POC (patchwork of the crosses), but the fact is that I really don't like fussy cutting, and I think the prettiest of these are fussy cut.  So I played around with my little elongated hexies and squares and here are some of my ideas:

  

Those are all kind of like a POC block.  Here's what else I tried:

And how about these:

Nah, they were close, but no cigar.  However, I really liked the middle three ideas, so I decided to go with them, with a little change.  Now they are not bumped up next to each other; there's a 2" square between each little octagon. 

I found some lovely Grunge by Moda in the Blitzen collection, and that's what the octies are resting on.
Each octy is 3.5" with that cute little 1" block in the middle of each one.  Here's what one looks like on the back of my hand.

And, here are 4 of them surrounding that 2" piece of Blitzen Grunge.

And more of the idea.

Are they adorable or what?  The official name of the quilt (at least at this moment) is Octagonny.