Modern Irish Bee: April

Whew!  April is flying by!  With it, though, has come some beautiful weather.  Would you believe I'm sitting out at night in the back garden writing this post?  Shocking.

This month in the Modern Irish Bee, the talented Miss Anna went for a few wild improvisational blocks using this tutorial as a guide.  She wanted a fussy cut to anchor the block, but wanted it to be off center.  From there we were let to dive into our scrap bins and stitch.

Now, I must have added in additional instructions to Anna's request because in MY mind (apparently in my mind only....) these blocks were to be somewhat monocrhomatic.  Even though her inspirational mosaic clearly has multi-colored blocks.  I wonder if I picked that theme up from the tutorial?  Anyway, everyone else has gone wild scrappy and I'm the only weirdo with monochromatic blocks.  Anna's nice enough to take them for her quilt anyway :)  Thank you, Miss Anna!

When digging through my scrap bins I really only had two piles of scraps big enough to make a block: teal/aqua and pink.  I thought they looked OK as a pair, so I went for it.  The aqua block has a Melody Miller teapot as the fussy cut focus point.  The pink block has a little Hello Kitty, the only thing in a pink vein that I have to fussy cut!

I squeezed in a few DS goodies, a small bit of Liberty, Nordika (because Anna digs it) and a few selvedges.  All in all I'm quite pleased with the result.  I love making these blocks, Anna.  I could stitch these all day long!  

Modern Stitching Bee: September Block

Chrissy, at Sew Lux, is our bee mama this month in the Modern Stitching Bee.  She has requested the Four Acres block from the Modern Block book.  It was a great choice as you get a big bang with very little effort...kind of like a D9P block.

Chrissy asked for one block on a white background with pink, aqua and orange piecing and a central brown cross.  She requested either tone on tone prints or colored fabric with a white pattern and specifically mentioned she has a soft spot for polka dots.  It was an interesting challenge, but much to my surprise I could find pieces to suit her request in my stash.  What luck!

For the second block we were free to choose any colors we wanted so long as we stuck to the tone one tone or polka dot theme.  I really like the Echo aqua in here and the green polka doted prints.  They make me happy.  For some reason my brain was stuck on the brown central cross from the last block.  Even though Chrissy gave us freedom, I just never shifted in my brain to choose another color for the middle.  Stinker.

In the end, Chrissy seems happy and they appear to fit well with the other blocks in the flickr group.  I hope she can use them...they will be out in the post shortly!