Now you see it....

.... Now you don't!

I decided to do some remedial work to the back of my QAYG bee quilt. This involved light-weight, double sided fusible interfacing, more of the floral fabric, a bunch of hand sewing and then some quick stitch in the ditch quilting to secure. So far I've covered the plaid flannel, the pink stripe and the hexagonally quilted green piece. In retrospect, I'm not sure the interfacing was necessary and it's left those patches very stiff. Maybe next time (ha, no next time) spray baste plus hand stitching and quilting might be the way to go. I'm hoping the stiffness will be at least partly diminished when I wash this guy.

I'm thinking of covering the left most purple piece, and potentially picking out some of the quilting on the large purple piece, since the vertical lines are not part of the piecing on the front. I may just go ahead and bind this first to see whether or not I can live with it as is though, because that's a lot of hand stitching!

Quilt in Progress

I think this past round of Queen Bee-ness has been my most successful yet! All blocks were returned on time and the results were pretty amazing :)

Once I had the majority of the blocks I started playing with layout. Obviously if I'd have been smarter I would have figured out whether all the batting scraps I sent out could be reassembled into a rectangle, but I didn't have that forethought. Luckily for me they could be wrestled into shape with only minimal overlap.

The real planning was done once all the blocks were returned, and I pretty much constantly changed the edge blocks as I was going. I pieced together the blocks using this tutorial as a guide, 1" strips of floral fabric on the back and 2" folded strips of purple on the front. It took longer than I anticipated but it was by no means difficult.

All the time I was sewing I had assistance from my little helper, Chinso our foster dog!

I followed a loose log cabin technique to assemble the top and only had to cut one bee block in half and make one single narrow strip to make a complete rectangle! But once all those blocks were together I ended up with a quilt of odd ddimensions - 44" x 54". So I took some wider strips of batting and made three more strips to add along the narrow edge.

Unfortunately, as awesome as the front looks (which I reveal when it's all done) the back is another story. I had thought that by using a few different fabrics a random pattern would be made that would make the back look more interesting. Um... no.

I'm not sure exactly what happened here. One piece is wrong side out, I have no idea where that flannel came from and well, the white thread looks horrible against the solids. SO. I have pre-washed and dried another floral and will be adding a different back to cover this all up. That raises the interesting question of how I'm going to quilt to keep the back in place. I'm guessing stitch in the ditch along the piecing strips and minimal quilting in the individual blocks. I'm not sure I can get to that before I show this at guild meeting on Saturday (in fact I can guarantee it's not going to happen) so I'll have to hide it from sight!

Preparation

My quilt guild runs lots of little challenges and group projects through the year, including block lottos and fabric company challenges, and most recently a group specific charity project.

So in preparation for this coming guild meeting, I spent the long Thanksgiving weekend sewing! Since we started fostering dogs pre-adoption, I've barely touched my machine so it was fun to dust it off and make things!

Fist up was a "low volume" 12.5" block for the block lotto (each block gets you a raffle ticket, one lucky person takes everything home!). I don't really have a lot of low volume fabric, so mine was more volume-y than perhaps it should be. Oh well! I pieced scraps together and then did a standard log cabin construction. Log cabins seem to be my default!

 The second group effort I'm participating in this month is a collection of blocks so that the guild can assemble "emergency quilt kits" for members who have a need to make a quilt in a short time frame due to some kind of unforeseen situation (health crisis, eloping, who knows!). Our first kit will use red and white crosses, using a provided center square for continuity. I delved into my scrap bag and came up with these.

 

The airplane fabric in the bottom square is just about my all time favourite fabric, purchased as part of a 30s repro fat quarter stack from my first ever quilting cotton purchase! If I ever found yardage of this I might buy it all.