Birds and Bees

OK, OK, it's a bit of a loose blog title.  The bee's are obvious enough - this relates to a bit of catching up I've been doing on the quilting bees I'm in.

To start with, here are the finished blocks I did for Brit Bee's Miss May (Trudi) who asked for Lynnebobsquarepants blocks and sent us some lovely "Giddy" fabric to work with - miraculously most of the triangles vaguely match! Thanks fellow bee members for all your tips on working with half-square triangles - I can't wait to see what the finished quilt looks like!

 

Then we have Miss June (Fiona) who sent us some gorgeous vintage inspired fabric and asked for disappearing-9-patch blocks.  Rules are rules so no photos of the finished blocks yet, but here is the siggy block so you can see a little glimpse of some vintage sheets that I managed to sneak in amongst the fabrics Fiona sent (possibly I may have broken a rule by publishing this, if so, oops, sorry!)

 

 Then it's over to the continent for Bee Europa, and Mays blocks for Elisa, who asked for a Crazy Scrappy block and sent me a delicious range of pink scraps.  Here's the finished block, and I can say officially that I loved doing this, I think I like the free-ness (that's not a word is it?!) of it.

 

Bee Europa's June block is still in the making, so more on that later.  However, I am Queen Bee for July so I've also been busy deciding on a block that I would like the ladies to make for me..

 

After much deliberation, I've opted to use this quilt-in-progress as my inspiration, with kind permission of Vickie at My Full Color Life. 

This was made by her bee members and I love it because every block is different, but the colours and clever use of an image in each block pull the whole thing together.

 

My quilt will be for my daughter Felix, and instead of birds, I've opted to use flowers as the theme.  Rather than send specific flower fabrics to all my Bee members, I'm going to ask them to design their own from a selections of pinks, lime greens, turquoises and dark grey fabrics.  The flower can be pieced, appliqued /machine embroidered etc and they will have total freedom over the piecing of the rest of the block.  I hope they will not think I am mad!

Now back to the birds, here's another of this weekends makes - this time for a little bird far far away.

It's my pillowcase dress for the charity Dressing a girl around the world. Louise from Sew Scrumptious has organised a massive dress-sewing effort and she now has over 70 dresses ready to send, which I think is just brilliant!
 

 Thank you to my wise readers who voted on the fabric choices (some time ago!).  I went with the autumnal colours and did my best to recycle:

• The autumn leaf fabric was a gift from my neighbour sorting out her loft
• The brown/orange/green print was languishing in my stash box, I just didn't have anything to go with it (until now!)
• The orange binding is vintage, picked up yonks ago at a car boot for 20p



•  and the beads are from the kids bead tub!

 So the only thing I had to buy was the elastic!  Given it was practically free, I'm really chuffed with how this little dress turned out and I hope the recipient will be too. The icing on the cake is that as a result of this project, I am also feeling slightly braver about constructing clothing, so who knows what I'll try next!

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