Progress

I've been making some good progress lately and thought I would share a few pics.

 

I added a few more blocks to my Crown of Thorns quilt and finished the top yesterday morning. The lovely ladies from That Stash Bee helped me with this one, and I love it! Now to decide on a backing. I'm also trying to decide if I want to quilt this on my machine or wait and take it to my mom's and use her longarm. It is about 75" square, so I'm not really looking forward to wrangling it through mine. But, I don't think we are going back to Iowa until this summer and I don't want to wait that long, either. What a problem to have, right?

 

The spiderweb blocks that I chose for my month in Always Bee Learning have been rolling in and surprisingly, I have done a pretty good job at keeping up on this one. This is what I've gotten so far and I'm still waiting on three more people. I love this Riley Blake La Creme Swiss Dot that I am using for the background. My plan is to add another row or two of the spiderweb blocks, then put this panel off-center and add more of the dots on either side. Sound good?

 

I also finished the quilting on my second Star Flare. It is actually hanging upstairs in the playroom right now, without binding. I didn't want to just fold it back up while I waited to bind it, so I thought the playroom could use a little brightening.

Now I've got stacks pulled for a friend's gender-neutral baby quilt and another custom order all while waiting for blocks to finish two more quilts. I guess I like to keep things moving!

Diamond Ripples

 

It's finally done! 

The Modern Blocks Bee was the first online quilting bee that I ever joined. It was based on the book Modern Blocks: 99 Quilt Blocks from Your Favorite Designers, with each member of our bee choosing a block from the book for everyone else to make and send back to them. I chose Lara Finlayson's block Diamond Ripples way back in November 2012. I sent each member a pack of blue, green, and yellow scraps along with Kona Snow and hoped for the best. I honestly hadn't thought too much about the block, I just needed something that was easy and had simple cutting instructions! We were in the process of moving at the time, along with working on our harvest, all of course with four small kids so simple was key!

 

Boy, am I glad I chose this block! It really does make an interesting design when multiple blocks are put together. As my friend and bee-mate Deb said in a Flickr comment, "I really underestimated this block!" and I couldn't agree more! I was quite indecisive about the quilting, but ended up choosing to quilt 1/4" apart in the white spaces and left the colorful parts unquilted. 

 

For the backing I just used a few blue prints from my stash. I thought that having a colorful binding on the quilt would be a little distracting so instead I made my first faced binding using this tutorial from Victoria of SillyBooDilly. It was really easy, but since you have to hand-stitch the facing to the quilt it took me nearly a week to finish it. There is a good reason I machine stitch my bindings! Now the quilt is hanging upstairs adding a little color to the kids' playroom.