December/January Bee Blocks

This weekends sewing goal was to get caught up on my quilting bee blocks, December just seemed to slip away from me, and I never got around to finishing up my blocks for the month

This block is for Lynne in the Solid block bee.  Lynne took mercy on the hecticness of December and requested a bright fun block in block design that she will be putting together for a fun bright quilt.

This block is for Natalie in the the Solid block bee for January.  This bee is really challenging my creativity, and I like it!  Her inspiration for these blocks was artist Carl Kleiner and his really cool paper art, here are the pics that Natalie shared with us to give some inspiration as to what she was looking for:

Natalie sent us some Kona Coffee for the background and sent some jelly roll strips to design the inside of our triangle.  I think my block goes along with the inspiration pieces, hope Natalie likes!

For December in the Simply Strings bee, Gwen requested Spiderweb blocks using the tutorial from Quilt It.  I'm excited to see what this will look like when all the blocks are laid out, as she requested that we use dark colored strips on one half of the triangle and light strips on the other half of the triangle when assembling.  It looks very cool!

And to end my quilting bee block bonanza this weekend, I wanted to decide on a block to make for the 1st quarter of the 3x6 bee.  When I received my Accuquilt Go! I immediately knew I wanted to get the hexagon die.  It finally came in the mail a few days ago, and I was thinking I wanted to give hand piecing hexagons a try, and incorporate them into my block for the 3x6 bee. 

I was very impressed with how nice and accurate my hexagons were when using my Accuquilt Go!  I've had less than stellar results with some of the dies, particularly the 5" square die, however I was able to cut 6 layers of fabric at a time and still have very accurate cuts with the hexagon die. 

I went to town string basting my red, white and black hexagons around plastic teflon hexagon shapes, and it went much quicker than anticipated.  I followed Julie's tutorial from jaybirdquilts for basting and sewing my hexies together.  In my head I was thinking of making the entire center of my block hand pieced hexagons with some sort of border, but when I realized how long it was taking just to piece the hexagons below, I decided on a flower layout and appliqued it onto white fabric.



I'm pleased with the outcome, this block is actually for Erika, as she requested red, black and white.  Hope she enjoys!  1 block down, 5 more to go.