Category — Quilting Bee

This is the first month for my new virtual quilting bee, Twice Around the Block VQB. We have half of the members from last year’s bee and half new members. Kim kicked off the year with some really fun fabrics by Denyse Schmidt and Heather Ross. This was my first time seeing Flea Market Fancy blue seeds in real life. Let me tell you, they are even better in person. The solid turquoise is a Moda crossweave and it is *gorgeous*! I’m off to order some right now actually!

Kim asked for blocks made from squares and rectangles. I decided to do strips of random heights and just worked myself down the block. Each piece is also a random width. I hope you like it Kim and I can’t wait to see the completed quilt.

August was Lisa’s month for our quilting bee. Her theme was “birds, branches and bungalows”. (She has an adorable bungalow.) She sent some great fabrics that really started getting me in the mood for fall. I decided to make a branch modeled after Elizabeth from Oh, Fransson’s Birch Quilt. Are you seeing a theme here? When in doubt for a bee block, refer to Elizabeth Hartman. LOL

This block was a lot trickier than I had anticipated. Even after marking all the pieces, it was still like jigsaw puzzle, figuring out the layout again. I should have taken a photo of the design first. Then, I really had to plan the order I needed to sew the pieces together in order to avoid any pesky Y-seams. But isn’t that what bee’s are about? Push and challenge ourselves?

Lisa, I hope you enjoy your block!

July was Gretchen’s month for the Sew New to Me Virtual Quilting Bee. This was a great month because the design of the blocks was left completely up to us. Gretchen only told us that these blocks were for a beach quilt, so to make them “beachy”. Up to our interpretation. At first I had no clue what to do. But inspiration struck and I decided to do a miniature version of the New Wave Quilt from Oh, Fransson!

All was going great at first. Rather than pieces that are 6″x9″, I cut 2″ x 3″, with 1″ wide white stripes in between. Some of you probably already know this, but when you are dealing with such small pieces, that leaves little room for error. Especially with this many seams and points.

Originally this block had 6 columns of waves. But the squaring up process required me to remove 2 of them. I think it still works though, and I love how the green and blue sashing turned out. I hope Gretchen likes her block, it was a blast to make!

I recently joined a new swap – really my only other swap other than the Sew New to Me Virtual Quilting Bee. The Mod Bento Block Swap is a centralized swap organized by Jessica over at Give it a Go. We are all creating blocks (as many as we want) based on Ashley of Film in the Fridge’s Modified Bento Box tutorial.

I’ve been looking at my fabrics…making piles…

Last night I made my first block.

I’m pretty excited about this swap – something about the unknown! It’s not too late to join. Here’s the details and the Flickr group.

ETA: Look at how much work I get done when the kiddos are at grandma’s house? I finished 4 more blocks…here is a sampling from each of them.