Quilt squares

A year ago I joined a monthly online quilting bee.  There's a bunch of these types of bees out there, you can find a bunch on flickr if you are interested.  Ours is special because it's with a group of mothers I met through Ravelry when we were all pregnant at the same time.  So our babies are growing up together, albeit all over the globe.  It's nice to have a group of women who are hitting all the same milestones at approximately the same times. 

Anyway, the bee ended in August, but I just finally finished the last blocks.  I am so relieved to have them finally done.  While I enjoyed the bee, things got so crazy for me at the end of the year and I felt like it was hanging over my head to get these done.  I still enjoyed making them.  Well, mostly.  The first one is the Flying Circle of Geese block that's been all over quilty blogland lately.  It's a gorgeous block, but I learned while piecing it that contemporary piecing and paper-piecing are not my thing.  I'm much more of a traditional block girl....the "cut two half square triangles X size, then piece to a block Y size" sort of piecing.

If you make four of these blocks you get the circle of geese effect, but after I ripped and re-stitched the block about 4 different times, I couldn't bring myself to do the whole circle.

The other block was for one of the moms who assigned each of us a month and sent us a fabric selection.  The only rule was to incorporate the red fabric (that I used for the stems).  She wanted us to make a block that represented the month to us, in whatever fashion we wanted.

I've always loved fall, so I asked for a fall month and chose to do this leaf pattern.  I found the instructions somewhere online, but the original block wasn't big enough (it was supposed to be a 12x12 block) so I had to do some resizing to make it work.  I hand-appliqued the stems instead of piecing them, which was a first for me.  It was hard to make the stitches seem invisible, but I was pleased with the end result.

I had a lot of fun with the bee, and although I sent some of the blocks embarrasingly late (these were June and July's blocks...sent in January!) I really enjoyed getting to try a number of different styles that I wouldn't have otherwise done.