Hexie progress

This is my Lifelong Project!  It gets worked on occasionally.  It is the first hand-piecing I ever started, but I can't remember exactly when, perhaps in 1977.  All  I know that it was already in progress before I met my husband, and that was in 1978.  I remember sewing on the train to and from work.  I have a set of aluminium templates (the only ones I ever bought), and originally used a craft knife to cut out the paper pieces... the Olfa rotary cutter was only invented in 1979, and I know where I was working when I got my first one, it came with a still in-use A4 cutting mat, sometime during 1980.  It was probably more than 25 years before I was convinced to buy a bigger mat!  The sides of the hexies are 1.25 inches.

This is where I am with it now, with about a third of the flowers stitched together....

... and where it was in October 2014, all loose.