Tag Archives: bee block

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My April block for Charles was a labor of love. With permission from the photographer, Keith Dotson, Charles asked us to "recreate" our one-tenth of a photo. (We only got our photo and didn't get to see the other parts.) I'm excited to share my process with you here for my chunk of the photo.

Charles asked us to work in an analogous fabric palette of solids with a wide variety of values including colors from 5 adjacent rows. I picked teals/turquoises and considered swinging into true blue or swinging into green. I started by pulling my fabric (yardage and scraps) for all 7 rows of the Kona card to really consider variety of color and value before I decided to go with the greens.

This is the portion of the photo I was assigned. This was ALL I saw to create my block.

Every improv project for me is a matter of starting with components. This was no different even though it was guided by the photo of the door. The photo above left shows me auditioning fabric combinations for different sections. And the photos above right shows my finished door. I purposely built it a bit oversized and left the outer edges messy. I always wait to trim until I'm sewing onto something else.

Then I got started on the bricks. I couldn't resist piecing the bricks AND the mortar, which meant I got to piece a bunch of skinny strips (1/8" finished width). I started by cutting out a bunch of bricks in a variety of medium to dark values in a variety of colors to make the wall scrappy. Then I sewed those onto the light/medium valued strips on the short sides so I could build the rows. From there I worked on arranging them into the finished rows, piecing together the pieces in each row, and then joining the rows with skinny strips pieced in between each row. I was purposely scrappy with the mortar fabrics as well. The last photo above shows me auditioning light fabrics to be the portions of the building that connect to that section of bricks.

And here's the brick wall once I'd pieced it all together.

I work on a messy table (you can actually see fabrics from a section project I was working on concurrently) and piece multiple sections at the same time.

The finished side window, auditioning the top fabric.

Above left: more auditioning of fabrics. Above right: I'd pieced the radiating lines of the upper window and needed to join it to the "quarter circle" portion of the window. You may be able to see the slight shadow of where the two sections overlap by about a half inch so that once joined with a 1/4" seam allowance they would lay flat.

Once I pieced this seam, I was able to add the curved lines into the window (see below).

Above left: the finished main components of my section of the door photo. From here I worked to add in strips for the detail of the trip, paying attention to the overall size and scale of where things should roughly connect. Above right: finished before trimming the whole block. I had trimmed the bottom of the sections on the left as a means to get things lined up well. The process was improv, so we were never aiming for photo realism, but I still looked at the ratios of how things connected in the photo to make decisions about how I aligned my sections.

This is my completed 14" x 28" panel. I am so very proud of it!

Tada! Can you tell I used my favorite colors? The piece above my block is my signature block for Charles (before I wrote on it). I used a section of what I trimmed off the top of the window.

Charles recently shared all the blocks together on his design wall. (He showed great restraint by not opening any of the packages until they are ALL arrived!) Friends, I am SO excited about this quilt. What a great vision and I'm so proud of the work we all did on these blocks. He shared these two photos for me to share here with you... the full black and white photo of the door by Keith Dotson and all 10 blocks on the design wall.

photo by Keith Dotson
Quilts Unscripted Bee Blocks for Charles

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In September, Elizabeth asked us to make an improv beetle. When I told my 16-year-old about the prompt (spoken "beetle" you can't tell the spelling) he asked if I was going to make John or Ringo. Haha.

Elizabeth's prompt asked us to make one large or two small beetle blocks, floating in a green (e.g. Kona Green Tea, Pear, Sour Apple, Kiwi, Clover, Pesto, etc.) background. Our feature colors were: black (required), dark pink (e.g. Kona Pomegranate), red-orange (e.g. Kona Chili), dark-ish yellow (e.g. Kona Grellow), and deep turquoise (e.g. Kona Oasis). I used them all with Kona Pear as my background.

I only took this one process photo, so I'll explain my process. I decided to use Pomegranate, Grellow, and Chili as feature colors in the beetle and pieces a wedge strip alternating pink, yellow, orange, yellow, etc. This strip ended up being about 4" wide and I cut it in half vertically. I initially thought I might piece blue onto both sides and then make horizontal slices to shift the sections horizontally and sew back together. But when I cut my wedge strip into two pieces I realized it was interesting to me to have the two sections vertically shifted in relation to each other. (Maybe you can imagine that if you shifted up the strip on the right the wedges would match up in the two strips.) So I decided to piece these strips as is to Oasis background. I made the wings of the beetle slightly separated by cutting a long skinny wedge of black that was just over 1/2" wide at the top and about 1" wide at the bottom. I pieced on a little piece of the green background to show that the body under the wings was slightly smaller than the wings. All the while I was mindful that I needed to fit my beetle into a 12" finished width with at least one inch of background on either side (per the prompt). This resulted in me trimming down the inner blur strips before attaching to my black/green wedge. I knew I would change the outer shape of the wings which would make the overall beetle narrower. And I decided on very small legs, eventually choosing 1" x 1/2" finished black legs. At the stage above I was still considering size and placement and my black scraps were used to audition options. In the photo above you can also see that I cut the head out of block and cut long black antennae, pieced on to green background at the top.

Beyond the above photo I decided to trim the outer blue strips narrower and to cut off triangles on each corner symmetrically. I cut a triangle off one corner and then flipped it over to use as the template to cut off the corner on the other side, repeating this process for the upper and lower pairs. Then I pieced three legs for each side into green background and added those strips and additional background to the body portion, then I put my three sections of beetle (antennae, head, body) together and added extra background at the bottom.

My finished block is a whopping 12 1/2" x 24 1/2".

I've seen just a couple other blocks from folks in the bee and look forward to seeing all of them together.

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In August, Emily pointed us to Bow Bridge in Central Park at spring sunny day by Helen Denisevich for our color inspiration. She asked us to choose two color groupings inspired by the vibrant colors in the watercolor and ink painting. She wanted a 12" x 12" block with a small section of one color group surrounded by the second color group. Any improv we'd like!

I loved the greens in the painting, ranging from yellow-greens into blue-greens, so I pulled fabric for that to be one of my groupings. Then I focused on the pinks in the tree and chose a variety of pinks, light to dark.

My finished block is approximately 12" x 12". The pink section in the center was informed by the shape of my scraps, starting with the largest triangle in the center.

The green section to the left of my center section was informed by scraps that were wedge shaped.

I pieced green strips for the top section, but when that was too boring for me I made a couple vertical slices to insert additional pieced sections.

I love having beautiful, saturated bold colors in a prompt. And the freedom to do any improv pieced we'd like meant that I could just play with the fabric. It was such a joy to create.