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!