June pizza box exchange

This month for our Pizza Box Exchange that we're doing in my quilt group, Material Girls Idaho, I picked Robyn's box and she's requested red and white or cream blocks. I decided to do a Card Tricks block.
Don't all the blocks look great together now. We have just 4 more months so we'll each have 19 blocks. Each box I pick up looks amazing! We only get to see our own box for a brief few minutes at the beginning of our meeting each month, so it will feel like Christmas when we finally get to take them home.

Bee Blocks

Here are my bee blocks for Bee Scrappy, a flickr group. I'm a bit behind, but we only have one more month to do, so it's not bad. This block was inspired by Oh Fransson's mod mosaic floor pillow block. I used this same method for the center of a quilt here. It takes some thinking and some time, but the end result is a fun look.

Fresh and modern

I finished this top today. It's fresh and modern and it looks like it belongs outside. It's from a pattern called Flower Show from the spring edition of Better Homes and Garden magazine, Perfect for Precuts. It's a twin size quilt and I'm anxious to put it on my friend's quilting machine because I could really use some practice. For years now I've been doing all my machine quilting on my home machine, you know, feed dogs down, and away I go. But I really need to give the big machines a fair chance. The first time I tried, it seems like it took forever just to put the top, batting and back onto the machine. I also just made large stippling waves all over the quilt. This time I'd like to change things up a bit and try some new designs, a few florals, leaves and even some pebbles.

I have two machine quilting idols that I follow in the quilting blog world and they both have amazing talent. The first is Natalia over at Piece N Quilt. The second is Don't Look Now who not only has beautiful quilting designs, but her applique is a one-of-a-kind. I keep thinking if I just stare at their work long enough and often enough that it will rub off on me and next time I attempt the big machine, it will then magically flow onto my quilt.

Wish me luck...

Fabric Flower Frills

These are fabric flower frills. We made them this past weekend from a template put out by Clover. Here's a good video tutorial on how to make them also. I made the small one, attached it to a pin and wore it that night. I got lots of compliments. I didn't know that's all it took to get a fun compliment, just wear a fun new fabric flower.

They were very easy, my young girls didn't have any problem with them. You can see they wanted to make the large ones and of course, they can wear it and look like island beauties.

Nikki decided she wanted to put a button in the middle of hers and make it a bit different than the rest of us. It looks beautiful against her black hair.