Finished block

My finished bee block...I kind of love it. I may need to make a great granny square quilt!

Bee blocks, Mom's quilt, and oh yeah, I had a baby

I'm finally back on my sewing machine after a hiatus of over a month.  I had my baby!  She's beautiful and wonderful, and everything went great.  But the adjustment of going from a family of four to a family of five has been a challenging one and not much time was left for sewing.  Fortunately she's started taking longer naps, which means I can sneak downstairs with the other kids and get some sewing in.

My August bee block is underway!

I think this is the first block in the bee that I'm actually sad to mail off...I wouldn't mind keeping it!  I'm still working on piecing it together (and I actually made more progress since this photo was taken this afternoon) but I already really like it.  The colors are really pretty to me.  I hope the recipient likes it too.

I also got some work in on my mom's quilt.  I'm over a third of the way done quilting, and I'm going to show it to her this weekend.  Hopefully she'll like the direction it's going, since I don't want to rip out all of that quilting.

I also got an urge to start another mini-quilt...a paper pieced Mariner's Compass.  We'll see if I actually get around to doing it...I feel like I have too many WIPs, and I want to finish some before I start some more.

It feels so good to have my hands back in fabric and my feet back on my treadle.

Bee Block #2

I finished the second block for my Newbee Quilters bee.  I think the block name is Garden Path.  The woman wanted purple and green blocks, and didn't care what hue.  I hope she likes bright!

I'll mail it off this week...just in time to start the March block.

I think this may be the last bee I do.  Maybe it'll be more motivating once I see the quilts coming together, but in my spare time I want to sew what I want to sew, not somebody else's project. I hope I feel differently by the end of the bee...either way, it will be a learning experience.

Bee Block #1

I joined a quilt block bee over on Threadbias.  It's a bee for people who are new to quilting, or new to bees.  I figured since I can answer yes to both, it would be perfect.  They posted the January block already.  The woman in charge this month wanted scrappy, brightly colorful log cabin blocks with logs of varying widths.  Even though I'm in the middle of my own log cabin quilt I was excited to try this because this is the first time I've mad a log cabin block where the logs were different widths.  It was an interesting experiment! 

I hope she likes it.  Scrappy and colorful?  Yes and yes.  She named the colors she wanted in the block and included every color of the rainbow (except purple), plus white and gray.  I tried to include it all.  I'm also trying not to pick it apart in my head and criticize it.  This is for beginners, after all.  Hopefully everyone will be kind.