As I mentioned before, pregnancy fatigue and general baby preparations have been stealing my sewing time so I figured my Stash Bee Hive could help me make blocks for a quilt that would coordinate with our little girl’s nursery.

Below is the color scheme we chose for the nursery.  I wanted something that was definitely girly but wasn’t just pink everywhere.  I also took some photos of my fabric pull to hopefully give my fellow hive members a good feel for the look I was going for.

Here is my block choice for this month – colorful string blocks with a 1/2″ (finished) solid white stripe down the middle!

This block is made using a tutorial for Paper Pieced String Quilt Blocks that was put together by Film in the Fridge.  I found the tutorial really easy to follow and have loved seeing my blocks start to arrive at my house.  I can’t wait to put them all together!

Now I must admit, Mary is lucky that this quilt top didn’t conveniently get “lost in the mail” because I love how it is looking so far and wanted to steal it for myself!

I loved the rainbow pattern that was flowing around each border but I also felt like it was ready to have a calmer, more quiet border to break up the color a little bit.  But I couldn’t completely give up the rainbow effect, so I decided to make skinny strips of color between larger white on white blocks!

I think the border ultimately accomplished just what I was hoping for!  The eyes have a bit of a place to rest between the super colorful borders without  giving up on the rainbow side of the theme.  The colored strips finish at just half an inch wide so they are really more of a subtle touch of color.

I used some black “chalkboard” fabric for the corners to tie back in to the black patterned borders from near the quilt center.

I hope Mary loves the progress as much as I do and if not, I’ll gladly take it off her hands when we’re done!  

As Hive Mama, Lynn got to be our first Queen for January to start to year off.  Lynn requested a scrappy HSTs block using bright colors and low volume prints.  I had a lot of fun digging through all of my colorful fabrics to cut squares for this block!

I hope Lynn likes it and can’t wait to see this colorful quilt come together!

I decided that I was going to add one wider border to a single side of Chelsea’s quilt instead of encircling it with a smaller border.  So I started off making a variety of stars and other small blocks using some solids and low volume background.

Then I laid them out alongside the quilt top and figured out I layout I liked.  This allowed me to easily see and measure where I needed to fill in more low volume background.

Soon, I had a finished addition containing five blocks on a scrappy, low volume background!

I added in along the bottom of the quilt top and I love how this quilt top is coming together so far!

I hope Chelsea likes it as much as I do!

It was sent off late late year to the next person in our group so this top has even more added to it at this point!

What wasn’t so easy (at least for me) was the wonky part.  I’m too much of a perfectionist sometimes and I struggle to sew wonky.  I’d rather just make it all straight and even!

I hope my blocks ended up wonky enough for Sue’s liking.  They made their way up to Minnesota back before Thanksgiving.

And that was a wrap for Stash Bee 2014!

Remember the colorful solids I was playing with a while back?  I mixed and matched between designers a bit so the set had Kaffe Fassett Shot Cottons, Pepper Cory’s Peppered Cottons, and Andover’s Textured Cottons all included.  Last time I checked in, I had sewn them all up into a bunch of HST and hourglass blocks.

Well, those blocks turned in to not one but two different quilt tops!

I had to get them both quilted up and bound really quickly too because they were for something really important.  Everything was happening so fast that I wasn’t even able to get photos of one of them outdoors!  My kitchen floor around midnight had to do!

I really love the look of the black and white striped binding!

Now what was the rush you ask?  Well – these baby quilts were used to announce to both my mom and my husband’s mom that they are going to be grandmas!  That’s right – I’m pregnant and we’ll be having our first child (a baby girl) in June!

I couldn’t wait to tell them so both quilts were finished and gifted within a week of me and my husband learning the news ourselves!  Both of our moms loved their quilts and started crying as they read the label on the back!

“Grandma’s First Quilt”
Quilt Stats:
Size: 42″ x 42″
Pattern: HSTs or Hourglass blocks
Type of Quilting: Straight line on my home machine
Date Finished: October 2014

So that is why I haven’t been posting as much lately.  Pregnancy fatigue and getting ready to grow our family has been stealing a lot of my time and, while I’ve still fit some sewing in, I haven’t found time to actually post about.  But hopefully I can get back on track here soon!

She also sent a cute little fox but I forgot to take a picture of him!

My mind immediately went to the beautiful fall colors at Brown County State Park since Christina is from my home state of Indiana where I was born and raised.  But then I thought maybe I should look more at fall in my new home state of Georgia.  And here in Georgia, we love to go apple picking in the fall.

I have always loved apples (they were always a favorite snack as a kid) so I love getting to go up to North Georgia every fall and pick apples.  And we’re always eating everything while we pick too!

So I decided that Christina’s quilt needed a border of apple blocks!

I am in love with how this turned out and it actually makes me want to make a fall themed and colored quilt for myself!  Let’s go ahead and add one more thing to the ever growing list of quilts I want to make!

I think the apple cores in the corners are my favorite part.  They are my husband’s favorite too!

Christina is having each of us make these little signature blocks for her quilt too.  Look how tiny it is compared to my rotary cutter!

I hope Christina likes how her quilt is taking shape so far and I can’t wait to work on Chelsea’s quilt for round 2!

That means that I get to pick the block and put together a tutorial and all month I can wait anxiously for the mailman to arrive to see if any beautiful blocks from my hive members have arrived!

I chose to go with the Star Value block!

Melissa at Happy Quilting Melissa put together the original tutorial for this block or you can check out the version I made for our Stash Bee site.  We also had some fun questions to answer in our Stash Bee post so you can go learn a few tidbits about me!

I can’t wait to see what everyone else puts together and I look forward to some fun packages in the mail this month!

Our Queen Bee for September is Ashleigh.  She hails all the way from Belfast, Northern Ireland and blogs at Ickle Tomato Handmade.  She wants to make a modern framed sampler quilt with jewel tone colors.  To achieve this, she wanted each of us to make a monochrome miniature quilt block (6″ max size), frame it in a neutral solid, and place it off center in a coordinated solid to the print used in the mini block.

I tried to go with classic blocks that would read well with just one color.  For one block, I chose to make a little pinwheel.  It finishes at 4″ square.  The final block size is 14.5″ so you can definitely tell how miniature my little pinwheel is.

I also made a flying geese block.  Geese are hard to make super tiny so this block finishes at 6″ square (still pretty small).  I love the bit of silver metallic in the purple print of the geese.  It doesn’t show in the photograph very well, but it looks really neat in person.  The final block here is 18″.

I tried to leave Ashleigh plenty of solid around the outside of my miniature blocks to that she can trim them down to whatever size works best with her layout and with the other blocks (she left finished size open to us).  Now these blocks can make a long trip across the pond to Northern Ireland!

October is my month to be Queen Bee so I won’t have any blocks to sew.  But I am so excited to see what I receive from my fellow Hive members!

Our queen for August was Melanie B.  She requested an X-Plus block in bright colors with a grey solid background.  I was really kind of excited when I saw that she’d chosen this block because I’ve pinned multiple pictures of X-Plus quilts that I love so I thought it would be fun to actually put together a few of the blocks for one.

Melanie wanted us to pick print fabrics that were “colorful”, “wild”, “60s” and “bright”.  That is definitely not my normal color palette but I had fun digging through my stash to try to put together combinations that would fit that request.  I hope she likes what I came up with!

Melanie said she was going to put together our blocks into a bed-sized quilt to give to her mom and stepfather.  They just got married last month (which is part of what threw off the timing of these blocks).

My blocks went out in the mail this morning on their way to California!  I hope Melanie likes them and that they play nicely with her other bright X-Plus blocks!