Busy like a bee

Today is brought to you by the letter B. First of all, I'm on to Plan B for my Doll Quilt Swap design. After spending a little more time following my partner around (virtually) I think that this suits her better than my original hexie/mendocino plan.



Bad photo but you get the idea, I hope. It's my first swap of any kind and I've found that coming up with a design that suits your partner is easy, it's coming up with something that connects the things you both love despite your diferent tastes that is fun & challenging. Does that make sense to anyone else?

My second B is Bee Seam Piecing Downunder. Yep, jumping into the biggest swap on flickr wasn't enough, I've also joined a really lovely Aust/NZ bee and should be receiving some fabrics in the coming week. It looked touch & go there for a minute with getting enough people but now we're all full up. After most of a year lurking around the online quilting world I feel happy to be coming out of my shell a little & can't wait to get sewing.

Third & final B is batting. I've started whipping up my batting squares for sewtakeahike's Quilt as You Go Quilt Along. There have been some truly gorgous blocks posted at the flickr group and since it will be a while before I can afford to have something long arm quilted this is an excellent way to get a queen size quilt onto my bed.

I'll be doing something a little different for my quilt as you go quilt - the blocks will be courthouse steps/drunk love type rather than scrappy log cabin and they'll all have a 2.5" white outer border which should look like sashing. I love the scrappy look but quilte honestly I just don't have that wide a range of fabrics (despite my dedication to building my stash!) & think I'd just be disappointed with the results. Scrappy will just have to be a future project, instead I'm going with the fabrics below plus a few others.




It's such a grey afternoon, maybe I could squeeze in one more B and run myself a bath...