March Bee Blocks

March bee blocks are in the books! Here they are:

For the Stash Trad bee, Amy of During Quiet Time requested a Winged Square block. She asked us to use a two-colored print for the center, with the half-square triangles on one side in one of the colors, and the HSTs on the other side in the other color—plus Essex Linen in Natural for the background. All such great choices to freshen up and modernize a very traditional block! Amy's tutorial for this block can be found here.

For my center square, I used one of the cuckoo clock prints from Moda's Hideaway by Lauren and Jessi Jung. I just love the kitschy Alpine theme of this collection—hello, I'm from Milwaukee. : ) "Kitschy Alpine" is an official home décor theme around here. Hideaway is an older collection but there's still some available on Etsy—you can pick up the print I used from Pink Castle.

For {Sew} Beautiful, Elizabeth asked us for a "Squaretastic" block entirely in Little Folks voile by Anna Maria Horner. I've never pieced in voile before. While it wasn't as difficult as I thought it would be, it was definitely slippery and different. In fact, I found the most challenging part was cutting it without it slipping around underneath my ruler! And it's just not quite as crisp and precise as I'm accustomed to with quilting cotton. But other than that, I didn't mind it, and it's going to make an amazingly soft quilt!

Finally, for the Milwaukee Modern Quilt Guild bee, our fearless leader Amy asked for this wonky X block from the book Modern Blocks: 99 Quilt Blocks from Your Favorite Designers. The note included with Amy's instructions said, "For all the planners in the group, welcome to my chaos." LOL. But it's a bright, fun, scrappy chaos, isn't it? : ) I screwed up that top X a little—I forgot to trim the strip to make it narrower and more wonky. Then I tried to go back and do it later, because it was looking too fat compared to the other Xs, but of course, that meant that patch was no longer quite 4"! Argh. But I think it turned out okay in the end, and other than that little mishap, this was a fun and easy block to do.