Money where my mouth is

As you know, a few weeks back I was encouraging you all to do whatever you can to give Alison a wee hand with her Soy Amado quilt project.  To prove that I'm prepared to do the very thing I was encouraging you all to do, I decided to take my pile of Bee blocks and turn them into a finished quilt for a child from the kids' home in Mexico City.

My second set of hipBees blocks are bright, fun and fresh and hopefully now they'll show a little bit of thoughtfulness from me and the bees and keep a child warm at night.

I'm pleased with the backing too, and all our Bee siggies are on there as a reminder of everyone who contributed to the quilt.  My thanks to my hipBee friends for their lovely blocks and for being supportive of my decision to donate this quilt to the Soy Amado project.

Now I just need to get it to the Post Office!

Oh, and I do believe it constitutes another FAL finish too!

Spiralling Issues

I've been having some spiral quilting issues for the past few days.

Mainly because the new walking foot I had to buy to replace my broken one doesn't allow me to position the guide bar to the left of my needle.  In fairness, I'm not sure that the last one did either in an official sense, but I was able to manipulate it slightly and the guide would stay in place to the left meaning that the bulk of the quilt remained to the left throughout the process rather than having to be crammed, coerced and downright bullied through the not-terribly-large throat of my machine.

The result of the substantial manhandling of this Bee Blessed quilt is that the wonk of the crosses has now been joined by a significant wobble in the spiral.  It's very hard to keep the curve smooth when there's so much hauling going on.  This 70" square looks a little more like a wobbly puddle ripple than I had intended.  Fingers crossed that the washer and dryer will help improve the look before this quilt is passed on for donation.

So, clever peeps out there, I have a sneaky feeling that there must have been a way for me to quilt the spiral with the guide bar to the right of the needle without all of this heartache (shoulder ache and backache too).  Was I doing something wrong?  Could I have helped myself by doing something obvious?  I do have a tendency to make life difficult for myself at times but I started this quilt 6 times and I just cannot see here how I could have changed the process without changing the guide bar position.  Any ideas?  Does your guide bar work both left and right of the needle?  Is this just a quirk of my Janome model that the bar will only sit to the right?  Any helpful suggestions will be gratefully received because I do like to quilt in a spiral but would honestly not want to go through this 'right of the needle' process again!

Sorry if that got a bit technical.  Back to quilts.  

I've stitched up the hipBees concentric box blocks into a flimsy and I really like how it has come together -

Then, I worked on piecing a back from some fun fabric with a ziggy siggy panel down the middle.

So yep, that makes another one basted and ready for quilting - not a spiral though!

Sorting boxes

These boxes have been fun to sort though.  They are the boxy blocks I asked the hipBees to make me back in September when we kicked off our second Bee year.

I sent out packages of black and white fabrics with a few bright scraps and asked for concentric box blocks alternating black and white rounds with occasional pops of colour .

These are the blocks that the Bees buzzed over and sent back to me and this week I've been sorting and rearranging them in the hope of removing them from my WIPs pile soon.

The usual placing, moving, replacing, moving again went on for quite a while until I finally settled on this layout.  My bad pics aren't doing them much justice but they do look great and quite funky together.  So now they've been labelled up in rows and await some stitchy attention in the not too distant future.

Belatedly, thank you hipBee lovelies for all the great blocks!



PS I'm hoping to bring you an update on my Mystery Medallion Quilt very soon - just need a few pics to finish off my post first.

Queen Bee Again

I may develop royal pretensions being Queen Bee this soon after my last turn (May) but, after a little re-jigging of months for hipBees' second round, I am the lucky Bee who beat all of the others to the top of the queue (wink) to kickstart the new Bee year.  We have said goodbye to some of our fabulous original Bees (Bye! - sob, sob) but have welcomed some lovely new Bees in their place (Hi!) and are all set for another fun year of block making.

So from these black and white prints

and these pops of colour

I have asked the Bees for concentric box blocks like these -

My blocks

I am hoping for random concentric boxes alternating in black and white final rounds with occasional colour rounds or centre square.  I think this will be a fun quilt and I'm already excited to see blocks appearing on the flickr page.

Go to it Bees!