.: catching up on bee blocks :.

Term 2 was some kind of crazy frenzy for us, so I fell a little behind on my bee blocks - this is really rare, as I hate being late for anything, ever.  So I spent Monday - the first official day of the school holidays - sewing up my bee blocks. 

For our Care Circle of doGoodStitches, Leanne asked for polka-dot quarter-circles (for May! ...), and emailed us all a template she had created in EQ7.  The polka-dot background could be any polka-dots, any colours.  And the quarter-circles had to be any-colour solids. 

Leanne also had July for our Care Circle (June was a rest-month, thankfully, otherwise I'd be sharing June blocks with you now too!).  These scrappy plus blocks are from this tutorial on the Bernina website, by Faith Jones of Fresh Lemons Quilts.  How cute will both these quilts be?!

And last up are Ocean Waves blocks for Rachel, for our Sew Sisters bee (which is made up of some of the girls from our Care Circle).  Rachel is currently working her way through making all the quilts in Denyse Schmidt's wonderful Modern Quilts Traditional Inspiration - there's an awesome #quiltthebook hashtag going on on Instagram.  Rachel has already made + received quite a few blocks, and the quilt is looking fabulous already. 

OK so that's me caught up until our next Care Circle month in August, and whoever is up next in our Sew Sisters bee for August/September.  Next on my list is finishing my Riley Blake challenge quilt for the MQG's latest fabric challenge.  xoxo cat

.: weekend sewing :.

I haven't shared bee blocks for ages, so thought I'd share these happy Lady of the Lake blocks I made over the weekend for Leanne.

Our doGoodStitches Care Circle has a little side-bee going on - the 'Sew Sisters' - and we have two months rather than just one, to make blocks.

Leanne asked for her blocks to include pink, lime, orange (wahoo, my favourite colour combo!), plus red, aqua and yellow.  I snuck in a few tiny fussy cuts.

These blocks were fun to make, and much quicker than the post-block fabric-mountain fold-and-tidy-up!   I sewed them up while watching Season One of 'Little House on the Prairie' with my youngest - she'd never seen it before and was completely taken by the Ingalls and their life in Walnut Creek :-)

I sewed up another couple of words blocks for my girls' quilts, again using the fantastic Moda Spell it with Fabric letter patterns.  Both my girls are huge readers and are rarely without a book tucked under their arm.



For the Moda letters, I cut each block out completely and then pop all the pieces inside the relevant page in the pattern book - and then flip through the book and sew the blocks in alphabetical order.   Once the letters are finished, I sew a one-inch-cut strip to the right-side of each letter (unless it's not needed), before adding it to the next letter.

Since this word was 'read', I made sure to use text-fabrics for all the backgrounds.

I couldn't help a bit of fussy-cutting from the wonderful Carrie Bloomston's Collage text-print for the A's.

And I liked the effect created from fussy-cutting the 'flower stripes' from Melody Miller's Ruby Star Polka Dot handbags.

Hope you found some time to sew over the weekend.  xoxo cat 

.: Sew Sisters Bee - blocks for Gina :.

I'm in a new bee - Sew Sisters - it's made up of seven of the girls from our Care Circle of doGoodStitches.  Time constraints and the craziness of life have stopped all of the Care girls from being able to join in.  I was hoping we could be called ANZASS - Australia New Zealand Awesome Sew Sisters ... but everyone's politely ignoring that clearly a-mazing suggestion ... :-)

Merran drew Gina's name out of the hat to be our very first Queen Bee, and Gina asked for Rocky Mountain Puzzle blocks, using the Quilters' Cache pattern.  Gina already has several gorgeous Puzzle blocks from an earlier bee, and also gave us a link to the gorgeous blocks on Amy's blog. 

Gina asked for a low volume background, the same subdued-tone (rather than super-bright-tone) fabric/colour for the rectangle, and also for the triangles.  I'd noticed that Gina likes Denyse Schmidt fabrics, so went through my Denyse stash to try and find not-too-bright prints to use (for the triangles in each block).   I took it as a given that we could fussy-cut the centre square! 

There are Tula Pink bees buzzing around the Cotton + Steel tiger, and Cotton + Steel US state names floating round the Kerchief girl (who I have been thinking of as 'Georgia' ... mmhmmm can you work out why? ...).

There’s a little trick to sewing the rectangle around the centre square - we’re talking a partial seam - but as Merran pointed out on Instagram yesterday, any lingering anxiety about partial seams has been squashed by our conquering the rainbow star last month in our Care Circle!  #takethat

I do love these blocks - Gina's quilt will be gorgeous - and I love her idea of combining blocks from different bees to make one quilt.  

And now it's on to a few tiny Ohio Stars for my Wee Bee blocks - hopefully I'll be sharing those with you before the end of the week.  xoxo cat