2BB (Two Bee Blocks) Part 2

Got two more bee blocks to share.  This one took a little time & patience.  I also switched around some fabrics and changed my mind twice, but fiddling around with the placement and fabric choices really paid off and helped this star shine!

The block is called Supernova and the tutorial is found here.  After sewing together the first two pieces unsuccessfully lining up the angles, I basted all the other seams before permanently sewing them together.

The next block is a modern house.  We could pick whatever design we wanted to make in a specific color palette (green, gray, orange), so I looked around online and settled on trying to mimic the lines of this house.  I wish I had tried to make it more two dimensional, but hey, it’s done and looks like the photo.

Have a great weekend!

Scrappy X Block Tutorial {perfect for a bee}

Hi there!  In December, I needed to make a scrappy rainbow block for a bee and we could come up with anything on our own.  I had an idea for a scrappy x block and saw something I liked in the book Block Party by Alissa Haight Carlton. 

The version I came up with is easy peasy and requires no special piecing skills.  The points line up virtually by themselves and this would be a perfect block for a bee.  Plus the only fabric you need besides the background fabric is your scraps!  It doesn’t get much better than that!  Here’s how to make your own.  The final unfinished size is 16 1/2” x 16 1/2”.

***I starch my fabrics before I cut them.  Before cutting, I lightly spray the fabric with starch and then dry press them (no steam).  I have learned over time that if I starch the fabric after cutting or sewing a seam, the fabric might spread out and become slightly bigger than the size I cut, or I get wrinkles. 

Materials:

• rainbow colored scraps (no white background fabrics, browns, grays, or pastels)
• four 8 1/2” Kona white squares (you could cut these from a 1/4 yard of fabric)

Steps:

From your white solid fabric, cut four 8 1/2” squares.  Then cut these on the diagonal so you end up with eight triangles.

Cut your scraps into rectangles that are at 2 1/4” wide.  Most of my rectangles were between 2 1/2 and 3 1/2” long.  Vary the lengths so your x looks scrappy.

Sort your scraps into 4 columns about 14” tall.  Sew your rectangles together to make a strip that measures 2 1/4” by about 12 to 13”.  Press the seams open.

These strips need to measure at least 12” long.  Now, trim each strip to measure 2 inches wide.  My thinking here is that you could start with 2” wide rectangles, but sometimes the strips can get a little off when you join the rectangles, so you have 1/4” to play with to make your strips straight and exactly the same width.  Trimming them down perfect will help your points line up, too.

I like to lay out my strips to see what the x is going to look like and make sure the fabrics in the center aren’t too similar.  You can just flip a strip if two of the same color meet up in the middle.

My layout changed when I sewed mine together.  I made this layout at night and then switched it around the next morning when I sat down to sew it.

Pin a strip to the white triangle.  Try not to pull on the fabric as you sew it because the edge of the triangle is stretchy and can become distorted if you pull on it.  Since I starch my fabric I don’t seem to have as much problem with the fabric stretching.

Now, this part is important for getting the points to line up.  Press two quadrants with the seam allowance toward the strip.  Press two quadrants with the seam allowance toward the white.  I did mine in groups of two so I remembered to press the correct way.

Here is a photograph of what the back of the block looks like.

Trim each block 8 1/2” square.  My ruler has a straight line on the diagonal that I just line up down the center of the strip.

The seams will nest up really nicely when you sew two blocks together.  Just press your center seams in opposite directions and those will nest together too.  Press your final seam either up or down and your block should have perfect points and be flat.

Your block should end up 16 1/2” x 16 1/2”.  If you’d like to use this tutorial for a bee, feel free to link to it, but please do not copy this tutorial to your blog.  I’d love to see this block in a controlled color scheme, too.

I’m using this tutorial for Beejeebers this month and can’t wait to put together the blocks to make my very own rainbow scrappy x quilt!

Swaps and Blocks

I just finished up my first bee block of 2013.  Only 5 more to go!  I may go a little overboard with signing up for these things and also volunteering to make angel blocks.  This block is called “birch trees.”

It was fun to pick the scraps to create the tree trunks and I loved working with Connecting Threads solid in persimmon—it’s such a pretty color.

I love to swap charms too!  So before Christmas I signed up for the Low Volume Charm Swap and just got my fabric ready to mail out today.  It was a great activity for my 4 year old to help with.

All the prints are Dear Stella.  The butterflies are my favorite.

Working on a few projects right now before I fly off to the Happiest Place in the World to enjoy some time with my family.

WIP Wednesday Scrappy Stash & Bee Blocks

In the nick of time, I got my bee blocks done yesterday.

A wonky star preferably not on a white or gray background.  I just love this block.  It reminds me of Easter.

A bright and colorful wonky log cabin block.

And two raw-edge applique circle blocks. 

When I saw the “Scrappy Stash QAL ” at Ellison Lane Quilts, I knew I had to join. There are lots of great QALs out there that I am trying my best to do (Tula Pink, Bee in my Bonnet’s Row Along, and Tracey Jay’s Treasure Boxes for Charity). Log cabin is my favorite block, and as witnessed here by quilt-cat Oreo, my scraps are out of control.

With school cancelled for two days due to the big storm, I had the kids help me organize my scraps by color so I could get started on the blocks. I have so many scraps it is unbelievable. They were all squished down in the big basket, but once we pulled them out, it was like there was 3x the fabric!

The best part about this project is that I will get my scraps organized by color, and I’m only using scraps for the quilt top so hopefully I will get rid of a lot of those scraps. I was able to come up with enough scraps to make all the colors of the rainbow without having to cut up any other fabric. So far I have 5 blocks done, so I think I need 25 more to be in the running for prizes. Are you doing the Scrappy Stash QAL?

Linking up to WIP Wednesday.

Have a great day!

July Bee Blocks & Polaroids Update

First up is this log cabin in bright colors.  The center is a Hello Pilgrim butterfly.  So much fun to make and choose all the fabrics!

Next up is a stained glass block using Kona medium gray and also bright colors.  This was fun to make, too.

A few weekends ago I made about 120 polaroid blocks for a swap.  Somehow, I misplaced about 60 of them and looked high and low and everywhere in between and couldn’t find them.  I finally got over it and made 60 new ones.

Well, yesterday I smelled burning in our bedroom.  I quickly ran all over the house looking to see what it could be.  Finding nothing, I took the kids out of the house and called 911.  The fire truck and hoses and everything arrived a few minutes later.  Turns out a lamp had malfunctioned and the bulb was brown and smoking.   I was just thrilled that my house wasn’t going to burn down!

When the firemen moved our nightstand to unplug the cord from the outlet, someone must have pulled on a knob that opens an extension table that I rarely use…and in there were all the missing Polaroids!!!  God works in funny ways sometimes! 

Today is the last day to mail them to meet the deadline. I never would have found them otherwise!

Linking up to Freshly Pieced.

Polaroid Quilt Block

I made stacks and stacks of polaroid blocks to swap via the Flickr Picture Perfect Polaroid Swap.  Then I lost half the blocks (no joke).  But I got my mojo back and cut out a new stack.  Then I sewed a few together to see how they look.  I followed the tutorial found at capitolaQuilter.

I found that you can use 2” strips to make the background, and I have one tip for making your blocks tip (ha ha).

Whatever direction you angle your ruler, your finished block will tip the opposite direction.  Leave 1/2 inch at each corner so you will have at least 1/4 inch seam allowance.  Don’t angle your ruler too much (see my block above—look closely at the tomato—it’s too tippy and a little corner was sewn off), or you’ll sew through the corner of your picture.

Now trim to 4 1/2 inches the other way.  Again, make sure you leave 1/2 inch at each corner.  Then you’ll end up with a perfectly wonky block like this.  And yes, I use a broken ruler.  Also, it is not the only ruler my kids have broken in half.  

I try to be organized, and I found that it was easiest to sort my pictures into two stacks of blocks—ones I wanted tipped one way and ones I wanted tipped the other way.  Then I just remembered to tip my ruler the opposite direction.  Sometimes I would get confused (especially since I had all 3 kids in my sewing room) but I’d just remember it would go the opposite from how I cut.

I finished up two blocks with 12 pictures each today and also my bee block for July’s Beejeebers.  Here’s a sneak peek, but I want it to be a surprise.

I also mailed out this vendor apron I made as a custom order for a local jewelry seller.  She saw my apron at the Maker’s Market last summer and asked me to make one. 

The front is separated into three pockets and the back is lined with denim. 

Mod Mosaic Quilt Block

I just made this block from Elizabeth Hartman’s tutorial found here.  It was fun to make and I enjoyed picking scraps for this block.  Sometimes I have a hard time sticking to just using scraps for a bee block project, and usually end up cutting into my fat quarters and bigger pieces, but this time I stuck to only scraps and I’m quite happy with how it turned out.

Today was 1/2 price at the “Treasure Store” (aka The Salvation Army Superstore).  My daughter found this cute clock for $1.

A little bit of paint scratched off on the 3 when I removed the price tag, but otherwise it’s in great condition and works.  I have a little beef with the way the price tags are attached to everything in the store.  It would have been way better to stick the tag to the back of the clock, and many times the clothes have permanent holes from the price tags.  But it’s still a fun and cheap shopping trip.

Friday Night Finish

Our Beejeebers queen selected this beautiful half square triangle block for the month of May.  I procrastinated until the last possible days and got the block finished a few minutes ago.

And then, as I was writing this post, I noticed the bowties in the top rows are backwards, so I just unpicked and restitched {again} and it’s fixed now.

It was fun picking through my scraps to find bright colors and prints I like.  My cat Oreo also had fun rolling in the scraps…

Overall, it took a long time to put together, kind of like a puzzle, but the end result is very pretty.

Thanks, Ursula, for picking such a beauty!  I hope you liked the colors and fabrics I picked.

Up next month?  Semi trucks.  I already have a few ideas spinning around!

Overindulgence of the best kind

No, I’m not talking about Jamaican Me Crazy at Bruster’s Ice Cream.   The mail lady just dropped off three parcels for me!

The yellow in the upper left is for a Rainbow Charm swap I joined, and I just joined another one but haven’t gotten my color assignment yet.  The fabrics are Half Moon Modern and I already used a charm pack of them to make something, but I can’t remember what!!!

The fanned out fabric is a fat quarter pack of “Hello Pilgrim” by Lizzy House.  And the yellow in the upper right corner is a cute coffee cup print (although I only drink tea so I like to think of it as teacups) and I think the other is called Metro circles.  I was on a yellow kick after searching for yellow fabric for the charm swap.  And I got a yard of Kona melon pink.  It coordinates really well with Ruby.

The Walk in the Woods fat quarters are to round out the fabrics for a quilt I am in the process of making.

The pattern is called Twirling Around and it’s designed by Melissa of Sew BitterSweet Designs.  Double the purchase price is being donated to a charity that helps mothers in Haiti.  When I saw that, I had to buy the pattern!  I am using a Little Apples charm pack, a Walk in the Woods charm pack, and some scraps I bought on Etsy of Sherbet Pips.  I just love the colors!

This quilt top is going together amazingly fast.  I got myself organized and have chain pieced everything, which I have never done before.  I’m not sure why I waited this long.  Wow does it work!!!  So that is my new thing I have tried this week. 

And then this arrived today too.

I’m not exactly sure why I bought them, if just to have a piece of quilting history.  When I first started reading blogs regularly, I saw the “Flea Market Fancy” quilt on Crazy Mom Quilts and really thought the fabrics came from flea markets.  I had no idea there were “lines” of fabric out there!!! 

So, would it be heresy to mix these fabrics with my all time favorite fabrics, Alexander Henry’s “Farmdale?”

Don’t they look good together?????!!!!!  What kills me is that my Joanns sold all the Farmdale floral prints for a long time and I never bought any.  Instead I paid about twice as much for them months later.

Finally I picked up this pattern for a new pincushion. 

My green tomato pincushion has never turned up.  I did, however, find a tap shoe filled with pins in the drawer of the bedside table in our guest bedroom.  How did that happen?  Esther is my best guess.

I can’t wait to make this turtle!  If it turns out nicely I plan to make this as part of my “Pay It Forward” debt (lol).

My sewing room is almost completely reorganized and painted.  It will probably be another month until it is ship-shape and I’ve painted the ceiling.  All the walls save for a little alcove are painted, my desks are put back,  my stash is in its place, and my machines are plugged in, so I am ready to go for the Friday Night Sew In.

Bea has been home sick for the past 3 days, so I haven’t been able to get out and buy any white thread to quilt my Flora charm quilt.  Now that we skipped completely over spring and it’s summer in full swing here in southern Maryland, I won’t be needing that quilt anytime soon anyway.  My plan is to finish up all the blocks for my Aneela Hoey fabrics quilt and do my two bee blocks.  I’ve been talking up “movie night with dad” all day to get the kids excited about spending tomorrow night out of my hair.  How about you?

I’m linking this post up to Trying New Things Thursday.  Melissa has a great tutorial on making lazy HSTs, which came just in the nick of time because one of my bee blocks requires an awful lot of them, and I love to be lazy!!!

Flora Charm Packs

Our local quilt shop is relatively new—it’s only been in business about 2 years.  I shop there pretty regularly, but since it’s on the other side of town, I only go about once a month.  The stock is uber-traditional…think Thimbleberries or Minick and Simpson.  But every once in a while I get a happy surprise:

This past week there was a 25% off everything sale, and I saw some Flora charm packs and picked up two.  When I got them home and decided what to make, two charm packs wasn’t quite enough, so I cut up a few solid charms from my stash of solids from Connecting Threads.  I love them!  The orange was nearly a dead-on match.  It’s called “Carrot.”  The green, yellow, and turquoise were exact matches.  How thrilled I was!   The pattern is from a book called “Simply Charming Fun Fast Charm Pack Quilts.”  It has a handful of patterns and I’ve made several of them and it’s true—they are fun and fast!

I also picked up a pack of Carol Doak’s foundation paper.  The block for Stash Bee this month is a star for a quilt that will be donated to Quilts of Valor.  Last month’s Beejeeber’s theme was “Family Game Night.”  I called Chutes and Ladders but procrastinated until the very last minute.  Luckily there was an extra day in February and it went out in the mail on time!

The block was tedious to make and took a lot of time (some of it sewing with a kid on my lap because it really took a lot of time), but I am pretty pleased with the result.  There are 100 (some fussy cut) 1.5” blocks to make up the board, and then I raw edge appliqued the ladders and slides. 

This block was for Lindsay, who said she likes bright colors.  I aim to please!  When I was at the LQS, I picked up a few fat quarters of some modern-ish floral Maywood fabric, too, to send along with my bee blocks.  Who doesn’t like a little extra surprise?

In personal news, it was a scary week for baby Veronica.  Her bellybutton has never healed right and she is 15 months old.  It continues to get infected and the pediatrician referred us to a pediatric surgeon at Children’s Hospital who saw us the next day.  The good news is that her umbilical cord is not connected to her bladder or intestine, which happens sometimes, but the bad news is the doctor has no idea why it keeps happening.  Apparently this is a very rare occurrence that he has only seen two other times.  So, she may have to have surgery in the future, but at least not right away.  The good news is, while it is troublesome, it’s not cause for serious alarm. 

The sun has finally come out, and the kids are itching to get outside!

January Bees

This week I got my January blocks in the mail to Sunni of Love Affair with My Brother for the Stash Bee.  She requested a tree block and a signature block, so here’s what I sent her way:

I added some white borders to the blocks I’ve received so far as part of Beejeebers.  I also requested tree blocks—or house blocks—to make a quilt called “Wonky Town.”

I received three more blocks this week and plan to add the white borders to them this weekend.

And I made some more progress with my Farmer’s Wife Sampler Blocks.  Here are my blocks laid out with the same blocks I made for Sunny in her fabric choices. 

Finally, I completed this quilt for my first finish of 2012.

I am linking up to Crazy Mom Quilts Finish It Up Friday for my bee blocks and my first quilt finished for 2012.  Hope you got some projects finished up this week, too!