April Believe Circle Bee Blocks

There hasn't been a lot of stitching going on lately but I did manage to complete my bee blocks for April with a day to spare. Whew!

Tiffany was our quilter this month and she challenged us with some half square rectangles in jewel tones. While these were a little slow to start, they were lots of fun to make. More than 30 different fabrics went into these blocks so they were great scrap/stash buster blocks.

The half square rectangles require a right and left side, which meant making half of the blocks one way and half another. Other bee members offered advice to make this less confusing, which was much appreciated. That is one benefit for waiting until the last minute to make these.

Thanks, Tiffany, for the challenge. This is going to be one bright quilt. I cannot wait to see the finish.

Be The Good Quilt Finish

It's always good to finish a quilt, but I am going to miss working on this one. Every part of it was fun, from figuring out the design, to working with such awesome fabric (flow by zen chic for Moda), stitching up all the letters, and getting it quilted and bound. The best part was your participation in guessing what it was going to say. Thanks for playing with me as this project progressed.

See those feet. They belong to my teenage boys who deemed it pajama Saturday. Those feet are size 13 and size 12. The boys are 13 and 15. Kind of scary to think that they are both still growing. The good thing is big boys can hold up big quilts easily. I don't have the exact measurements for this quilt but it is almost square and somewhere in the 65-inch range.

The weather here is gorgeous this weekend. Couldn't resist a shadow shot.

I went with my original plan for machine quilting. There are four straight lines between each row of letters with wavy lines of quilting placed at random widths across the rows of letters. I like the result. Not too fancy and simple enough not to distract from the message on the quilt.

Did you ever have trouble writing in a straight line on the board when your were a kid? I did. It was always either going up hill or down hill. There is some of that in this quilt, too. If you look closely at the second row, "THERE" has some up hill quilting going on, especially over the letter T. It is just extra charm for this quilt.

The back is a solid burnt orange. It was a piece that had been hanging around in my stash for a while. Originally, I considered a pink binding but pink and burnt orange were not going to work together so I picked a lime green Moda Marble instead. I love it when I can use up stash to finish a project. The thread used throughout the quilt is a light gray Aurifil 50 weight. It was perfect to blend where it should and contrast where it should.

There are seven different filler blocks throughout the quilt, all simple combinations of half square triangles. A tutorial is available over on the Moda Bake Shop for the filler blocks.

Thank you Moda for letting me play along with your Spell It With Moda celebration.

I think I am going to take this quilt to work and hang it in my office for a while so I can remember this message every day.