funny honey bears

i've reordered these pink/purple honey bears from heather ross's far, far away 2 collection for windham fabrics twice now. this is entirely ironic since i didn't even like them when i first got them. in fact, i thought they were plain weird in this colorway.

how did i end up with them if that's how i felt? sometimes i order bundles, fat quarter or half yard sets, of collections that i mostly like but don't completely like every single piece. this is usually because either i'm lazy or late.

when i'm lazy it's because there's a collection where i like the vast majority of the prints and don't want to weed through the collection for pieces i do like to go individually in my cart (very tedious and time consuming), so i decide to take the few unappreciated pieces with the rest.

other times it's because i'm out of the loop on new fabrics or not in a buying period when the fabrics first come out. if i belatedly become aware of the fabrics or decide after deliberation i do want it after all, sometimes it's too late to get anything but a bundle. or there are fabrics i really want that are only available in the bundles.

so. this is how i came to first own the oddly colored honey bears that i thought i'd never use. i mean, honey is not purple! why are these bears purple? weird. not appealing. not my jam.

along came "fall paint lake" and i needed some low-volumes to supplement m original fabric picks for it. there was already some heather ross in the pull and this was a low-stakes quilt for me, so i decided to try the honey bears because i needed some more touches of purple in the quilt.

 this top was tucked away for quite a while before becoming a full quilt. it wasn't until recently that i spent any time with it and got to like it. and that's when i started loving the honey bears. yep. they grew on me!

between using the purple bears in the "fall paint lake" top and completing that quilt came "low-volume crossroads" and the bears made an appearance. i mean, they fit in with the palette of this crazy, scrappy quilt, so i used them here. they blended right in. 

and i kinda liked them after a while.

 now i find myself making a pinky-purple quilt using the exact color of the honey bears and i reeaaally want to include them. i only got about half the mice i needed when i fussy cut them out of the fat quarter i had, so i need something else to replace them in the rest of the 16 patch blocks in "edna."

which is why i just paid something like 5x as much as the original price for the out-of-print purple honey bears i once thought were weird. seriously, this is probably per-square-inch the most i've ever paid for fabric. more than liberty, even. imagine that.

i admit my mistake! this isn't the first, second, or even third time i have come to appreciate a heather ross print i was first unsure about or unattracted to. i give in. she knows what she's doing and if she colors honey bears a weird shade of pinky-purple, she is right. it's a good idea and i'm going to love it.

eventually.