Siblings Together Bee quilt 2016

My Siblings Together Bee quilt for 2016 is finished (apart from the label which I really must do).

The block I chose this year used the Patchwork Wheel tutorial by Don't Call Me Betsy.

I decided on a scrappy style in colours appropriate for a girl.

As usual by bee mates sent some gorgeous blocks. There's a huge variety of different fabrics in the quilt and apart from individuals using the same fabric more than once there were no duplicates. It goes to show what a large variety of fabrics are available for us quilters to be tempted by.

Big thanks go to my generous bee mate Joanne Jones for sending me the binding as she knows I'm not a great fan of binding making.

I hope a young lady who is given the quilt at one of the Siblings Together camps in the summer will love it.

Scrappy Log Cabin Quilt for Siblings Together

In the first year of quilts for Siblings Together I joined a bee orgainised by Lynne of Lily's quilts. We were immensley lucky to be donated fabrics by Moda with which to make our quilts. For my month of the bee we used S'more Love by Cosmo Cricket and I had a few fat quarters and some scraps left. Last year I decided to make a quilt with these left overs but didn't have enough to complete a whole quilt. Here's where a group of kind, generous ladies came to the rescue. I posted a photo of the fabics on Instagram and asked if anyone had some co-ordinating scraps they could donate. Of course the answer was "yes" and within a few days I received fabrics from Julie, Carol, Catrin, Jo, Mary and Sonia. I made a Rail Fence quilt which I sent to Siblings Together in 2015.

I was still left with enough fabrics to make another quilt. As many of these were strips and small pieces I decided a Log Cabin design was the way to go. I had some left over strips of wadding left from previous projects which I cut into 11 inch squares, I then sewed the fabric logs directly onto the wadding (quilt as you go). I joined the blocks together and spray basted the backing onto this top/wadding piece. I quilted in the ditch between the blocks which was enough to secure the backing.
Et Voila, a quilt  for the 2016 Siblings Together camps.

A quick round up.

I've never been one to worry about how many quilts, cushions etc I make in a year but when I looked back on 2015 I was rather surprised, and admittedly disappointed at the small number of completed projects.

 The above cushion was started and completed in 2015 and the one below was started in 2014 but finished in 2015.

 I made this quilt for my husband, again started in 2014 and finished in 2015.

Quite a lot of my sewing time was spent on making quilts and bee blocks for Siblings Together, something I'm more than happy to spend my time on. This will continue in 2016 as myself and Nicky are going to continue rallying the troops on our Siblings Together Quilt Group blog and on Instagram,  as well as making quilts ourselves. I think I managed to send five quilts to the charity this year. Three of these were bee/group quilts I completed and two I made all by myself!

I plan to finish the next two quilt tops during the next few months. I just looked back on the blog to see when this one was started and was surprised that it was back in September 2014. It's now bigger than in the picture and I've started quilting it, although I've not done any for a while. I've cleared the decks in my sewing room ready to do some more this weekend.

This next one was started a few months ago. It involves both paper and curved piecing and has presented some "fitting" challenges which have required some pattern alteration but I think I'm there now. Another six blocks to go.

I'll do a proper post about this next one soon but briefly, the Strips bees are doing another round of the bee with a different theme and this is what I made to start off my quilt.

Bye for now, Maria