Setting Direction

Um, so it's been a while, eh? It's been a little stupid busy around here since January and at the end of the day, I just didn't have the energy to blog. Kiddos are away at camp this week (woot woot!) and lo and behold, I've got some energy back. LOL

My current project is my 2016 BeeSewcial quilt. My month for BeeSewcial was all about direction -- I asked my BeeSewcial mates to help me make a village or city. And boy, did they deliver! I can’t believe it’s taken me this long to share what the fabulous blocks they made, but here goes:

From Leanne at She Can Quilt:

A post shared by Leanne (@shecanquilt) on May 22, 2016 at 6:37pm PDT

A post shared by Leanne (@shecanquilt) on May 22, 2016 at 1:29pm PDT

From Stephanie at Spontaneous Threads:

From Felicity at Felicity Quilts:

From Karen at Capitola Quilter:





From Kari at Craft Happy:

A post shared by Kari Vojtechovsky (@quiltsforthemaking) on Jun 17, 2016 at 2:49pm PDT

A post shared by Kari Vojtechovsky (@quiltsforthemaking) on May 29, 2016 at 7:25pm PDT

From Anne at play crafts:

A post shared by Anne (@playcrafts) on Jun 4, 2016 at 9:29am PDT

A post shared by Anne (@playcrafts) on Jun 11, 2016 at 8:32am PDT

From Debbie at A Quilter’s Table:





From Hillary at Entropy Always Wins:

A post shared by Hillary Goodwin (@entropyalwayswins) on May 22, 2016 at 5:07pm PDT

A post shared by Hillary Goodwin (@entropyalwayswins) on May 21, 2016 at 6:06pm PDT

From Marci at Marci-Girl Designs:







Roundabout?! I adore roundabouts and am so excited that my quilt will have one. If you check out Marci's Instagram feed, you'll see how she did it.

Aren't these so fun?


And here are my blocks: 

If you have a chance to check out the images on the #beesewcial feed on Instagram, you'll see that the blocks have back story. So cool!

After receiving the blocks, I'll admit that I got a little (ahem...very) anxious about doing these blocks justice. I pulled them out multiple times over the past year and played with the layout. My rule was this: each block had to connect with at least one other block, but I could add roads and negative space. 

More grid-like:

A little less grid-like:

Definitely playing with some alternative grid work:

After a lot of mulling and photos and rearranging and mulling and photos...repeat, I found a layout that I loved and started putting it together. It's just about done so I will share it soon.

Cheers!

Modern Block Monday - Transitions

For September's Bee Sewcial theme, Anne from playcrafts chose the theme transitions. I decided to do an improv, bargello like block to mimic the colours in and the reflective water of her inspiration painting, Central Park by Leonid Efremov.

Getting started - lots of improv strips.

More progress. 

The finished block. 

Approx. 17" by 24".

Check out what my bee mates made for Anne in the #beesewcial feed on Instagram.

You are always welcome to follow along with the prompts and post your blocks to Instagram under the #inspiredbybeesewcial.

With Glowing Hearts

Have you heard about Canada's Big Quilt Bee with the Canadian Quilters Association (CQA)? They have a set a pretty BHAG (big, hairy audacious goal) for 2017. 1,000 quilts for Ronald McDonald House! The Big Quilt Bee will be held June 14-17, 2017 at Quilt Canada 2017 in Toronto, ON. They’ll have sewing machines, long arms, mid arms and lots of volunteers to work on quilt tops and stacks of slabs made by hundreds of Canadian quilters. It's going to be fun!

Hmm, I wondered if there's a Guinness World Record for the biggest quilt bee? So I looked it up. There's a record for the largest patchwork quilt, the largest bee house and the largest gathering of people dressed as bees (why?), but I did not find a record of the largest quilt bee. Something to think about, CQA?

But I digress. CQA is looking for blocks to get this party started. 12.5" slab blocks in particular with at least one piece of special Canada 150 fabric in it. Slab blocks are really easy to make and you can find the instructions on the Canadian Quilters Association site.

When Rita from Fabric Please approached me for this bee, I was game and I figured some of you would be too. She sent me this great charm pack of the Glowing Hearts fabric line by Grace Noël for Trendtex to get me started. She is carrying the entire With Glowing Hearts line that is available for purchase here.

I'm currently sitting in an arena so that hockey stick is very à propos!  

It's a beautiful fabric line, done to celebrate Canada's 150th anniversary, which officially kicks off in 20 days by the way!

I've added in some of my red, aqua, grey and white scraps to the Glowing Hearts charm pack. I didn't think I had that many in those colours, but I've used a lot of them already and I still have more. Here's one of my blocks so far. I still need to add more rows to get it to 12.5". but it's coming along. A perfect low-stress project to do before or after the holidays.

Now here's the exciting part where there's something in it for you! Fabric Please! has offered up some prizes for people who donate slab blocks to the project. Woo hoo!

I will run a linky party here starting next week and running until May 17, 2017. You can link up the slab blocks you make for the project. Only slab blocks please -- this isn't TGIFF! or W.I.P. Wednesdays or Sew Thursdays or New Project Tuesdays or Manic Mondays or any of those other linky parties. This is just for slab blocks for Canada's Big Quilt Bee. I will remove your post (with love though) from the linky party if it's anything other than slab blocks. More details to come about the prizes from Fabric Please! next week when the linky party starts.

Note: your slab blocks do not have to have Glowing Hearts fabric in them, but they do need to have Canadian fabric somewhere in it. Also, you do not have to be Canadian for this either, just use a bit of Canadian fabric in your block. 💋

Mail your unfinished quilt tops and/or slab blocks to: Leslie Whitby 2895 Almonte Road, Carp, ON, K0A 1L0. Last day to mail is May 30, 2017.

Modern Block Monday - Lake Country

The wonderful Felicity from Felicity Quilts was our Bee Sewcial Queen Bee for the month of June. She chose the theme of Lake Country and we were to do blocks of blue and green.

Here are my contributions:

Felicity received her blocks and has started playing around with layout. Looking great!

If you want to follow along with the Bee Sewcial gang, check out #beesewcial and #inspiredbybeesewcial on Instagram.

Modern Block Monday - Triangles

Happy Monday, all! I got to check out Quilt Canada 2016 in Toronto on Friday, which was awesome, but I'll tell you more about that in a future post. Today, I want to play a little catch up on my Bee Sewcial blocks. For April's Bee Sewcial theme, Marci (@marci_girl) from Marci Girl Designs picked repeating triangles in blues. Mmm!

Block 1 that I made for her:

Check out that improv Y-seam. Bam!

Block 2 for Marci:

She seemed to really like them so Phew! :)

To see the blocks my beemates did (very much worth doing!), check out #BeeSewcial on Instagram. If you'd like to follow along with this bee, tag your blocks to #inspiredbybeesewcial. The more, the merrier!

Modern Block Monday - Layers

March's theme for Bee Sewcial was layers. Hillary (@entropyalwayswins on Instagram) wanted blocks that conveyed layers in turquoises, blues, oranges, greys and whites.

I knew what I wanted to do with one of the blocks early on. I did layers of the Fibonacci sequence on the first block, both horizontally and vertically.

The second block took a while to figure out though. In the end, I used some of the leftovers from the first block and then added more improv layers in the colour order going from warm to cool and back to warm again.

To see the blocks my beemates did, check out #BeeSewcial on Instagram. If you'd like to follow along with this bee, tag your blocks to #inspiredbybeesewcial.

BeeSewcial - Let's Get Planning

May is my month to be Queen Bee for BeeSewcial. I've known almost from the start what I wanted to  explore with this group. I'm asking my beemates to channel their inner urban planner this month. Our theme is direction.

My inspiration is Stephen Von Worley's maps coloured by orientation. I find his maps fascinating and would love to see what we could create with fabric. I would like each of my beemates to create a couple of neighbourhoods/city areas (2 - approx. 12.5" x 12.5" blocks) or one big neighbourhood/city area (approx. 12.5" x 24.5") so we can build a city.

Like most cities, some neighbourhoods are grids, others partial grids and still others are all curves or some combination of all three. Different areas of a city are planned over time by different people, but they still work together. Applies well to a bee quilt, no?

For some additional inspiration, I some photos I took on the plane to and from California to get a feel of what different cities look like from the air. Google Maps is also great for exploring layout ideas, but feel free to make it up as I did in my test blocks below.

Some guidelines so the blocks can work together:

• Background - medium to dark greys (no Pepper or Black). You can use one value for the background or several like I did for mine. I used greys in the Kona range from Coal to Charcoal, but it doesn't have to be Kona. 
• For Stephen's work, roads at approx. 90 degrees to each other have the same hue. For our purposes, the colours within a neighbourhood have the same hue, but can have different values of that hue (great for using scraps). 
• Please have at least one road leading out of your neighbourhood so I can link it to other neighbourhoods.
• Aim for roads to be between 1/2"-ish (residential roads) to 2"-ish wide (highways). 
• For those who would like to give our city some water, which every city or town needs - light to medium greys.
• I'm not a fan of appliqué and would prefer pieced blocks.

Here are my test blocks:

For anyone who would like to play along, you are more than welcome to do so! Add your blocks to #inspiredbybeesewcial on Instagram. We'd love to see what you do with this challenge. 

Questions? Fire away!

Modern Block Monday - BeeSewcial - Let's Get Comfortable

While January's Linear theme for BeeSewcial was a good challenge, February's theme was a stretch to say the least. Actually, that was the theme -- Stretch! Karen (@capitolaquilter on Instragram) had us design and make blocks in 'denim' colours with neutrals using the Stretch theme. So interesting and so challenging. After the initial relief of realizing that we weren't working in actual denim, I will admit thinking, "What did I get myself into?!" No, I can do this! I think.

Her inspirational photos and instructions were very helpful. I took the organic roots photo as inspiration for my blocks. I started building out one block of organic curving lines. Once it got to about 14" square, I cut it into 2 to make the foundation of both blocks. I added an inset 'jean hole' to break up the negative space on one of the blocks. The blocks didn't turn out like the inspirational photo I started with, but I'm happy with where they went.

One beemate thought they looked like ligaments. Huh. Hadn't even thought of that, but it's true!

To see more of what this bee is up to, check out #beesewcial on Instagram and if you'd like to play along, you can post your blocks to #inspiredbybeesewcial. Come play!

Modern Block Monday - BeeSewcial - Let's Get Linear

Hi all, this is my first bee block for a new bee I joined this year. I'm pretty psyched to be joining the talented women of BeeSewcial. Solid, improv designs according to a theme. Just the creative challenge I am up for! And a six week window for completion is the cherry on top!

Stephanie (@SpontaneousThreads on Instragram) was our Queen Bee for January. She requested deep yellows and neutrals with a pop of hot colour using Let's Get Linear (Line) as the inspiration. Check out her blog post for more information about the direction. Very cool!

We could do two blocks of around 12.5" by 12.5" or one block of 12.5" by 24.5". I thought I'd try the one larger block.

To see more of what this bee is up to, check out #beesewcial on Instagram and if you'd like to play along, you can post your blocks to #inspiredbybeesewcial. Come play!

Modern Block Monday - Flying Geese Options

It's an exciting night here in Canada -- Election Night! So far, it's looking like a major upset with a Liberal majority over the incumbent Conservative majority. Wow! We'll see how things continue to unfold...

To take my mind off the election, I thought I'd share some bee blocks. :) We had flying geese blocks requested for two months of our Canadians Quilt Bee in June and July.

For June, Dominique at The Running Thimble wanted flying geese in this colour way, using this tutorial.



For July, Francine (@melrosecakes), sent us the green background fabric for us to make scrappy flying geese using this tutorial.



So fun to try different techniques to get essentially the same block!

Damn, now I have to go back to the election... ;)

Update: Election Results - :)

In case you are interested, here's an amusing take on the election from John Oliver:

Happy Birthday, Canada!

Happy Canada Day, Eh!

Hi everyone, I hope the weather is better in your neck of the woods -- raining here. It had better clear up in time for the fireworks tonight. We take our fireworks seriously around here!

Things are looking up. My mom finished her treatments yesterday so now we wait to see how well they worked. Fingers crossed, but it looks like they caught it early. Woo hoo!

School's out and summer has officially begun (not that you'd really know it by the weather lately, but at least it's green outside, instead of white!).

I've even been doing some quilting -- yay!

First, I caught up on my Bee blocks:

For Krista in my OMQG Bee, the Stamp Collection block by Elizabeth Hartman (tutorial). Krista provided the grey solid and we provided the scraps. She wanted scrappy...and she got it!



Stacked books for EP (EP provided the Kona Snow and the tutorial, but you can find a tutorial using a different method on Craftsy):

 

Flying Geese for Dom @ The Running Thimble. I love Dominique's inspiration! (tutorial from Quiltcetera):

 

Now that I'm all caught up, I do some other fun projects. I've started a project with these lovelies courtesy of the Fat Quarter Shop and Art Gallery Fabrics... :D

 


Hope you have a fabulous day and Happy Canada Day to my fellow 0.05% of the world's population. He he!

And the answer is, yes of course. ;)

Modern Block Monday - Leggings Block

The moment I saw Elizabeth Hartman's Knee Socks block, I was smitten. It's a block that finishes at 24" though, a little too large to be asking my OMQG Bee mates this month. I decided to do a cross between her Knee Socks block and the blocks I'll be making for this Fibonacci Flow design.

I give you...Leggings. ;)

It's a 12" finished block, fun for stash picking. I couldn't rightfully say stash busting because it just doesn't use all that many scraps, but it is fun.

Wanna make one yourself?

Cutting Directions:

Background fabric (charcoal grey in this case):
A - Four (4) - 1.5" x 6.5"
B - Six (6) - 2.5" x 6.5"
D - Two (2) - 2" x 6.5"

Scraps:

C - Ten (10) - 1" x 6.5"

Layout:

1) Sew the pieces together in each of the columns according to this layout diagram.

2) Sew the two columns together.

I'll be providing the charcoal grey for my bee mates and asking them to scrap bust the scraps so I can get a good variety of fabrics. I'll also be asking them to keep the columns separate so I can mix and match them with other blocks.

Here are a few designs I've been playing with for this block:

All About Those Leggings: 

I Just Need Some Space - Lap:

I Just Need Some Space - Twin:

Enjoy!