We had a great response to the recent appeal for new Bee members, not only sufficient to bolster Bees 1, 2 and 3 but enough to start another Bee. This is very exciting and it’s been wonderful to see everyone’s enthusiasm and so rather than wait until the end of the month to post this I thought I’d get this up a couple of days earlier. You’ve still got to the end of October to send them to me but for those who want to crack on then here it is.

I’m acting as coordinator for this group and whilst everyone settles in I thought I’d kick it off and set the first month’s blocks. So here goes…. something reasonably straightforward for people to cut their teeth. The bow tie block… which when you put four of the blocks below together make the blocks above in the top picture

I try to be reasonably prescriptive not to tie you down (oops pun there!) but stop the agonising – what colour did she want, is this what she meant, how low a volume does she want etc etc!! But equally I don’t want to be so prescriptive that no one has that colour of fabric in their stash. For this block I would like quite a strong contrast between the background and foreground colours so saturated or strong colour please but any colour would be perfect. It doesn’t have to be the same print in each block but they do need to be from the same colour family and the same sort of strong tone like my yellow and pink blocks. They’ve each got a couple of different prints but read the same tone of colour. With the background fabric I’d like white or very light grey again the lighter the better so the contrast is good. The background fabrics can be scrappy too as in my blocks above or all the same. Hopefully my example blocks give you an idea of what I’m after.

Each block needs four bow ties blocks. I’d ideally like 2 large blocks so that is 8 bow tie blocks. When you’ve sewn up the four bow ties blocks into one block can you please trim the blocks to 12.5″- these are the unfinished size and when I sew them together to make a quilt top they will be a 12″ finished

So how to make them. I will show you how I made mine but as we have many experienced and talented quilters in this bee do feel free to make them your way as long as the final block is made up of 4 bow tow blocks and equals 12.5″.  As I’ve said this is the unfinished size  and I used a scant 1/4″ as I normally do for all blocks as I often need wriggle room when trimming

Cutting for 4 bow tie blocks to make 1 larger block

From background fabric cut

8 x 3.5″ squares

From coloured/patterned fabric cut

8 x 3.5″ squares

8 x 1.75″ squares

 

Taking a 3.5″ background square place a 1.75″ square right sides together on the corner and then sew across the corner – you can just make out the stitch line in the photo below.  You can if you wish draw a line  on the back of the small squares but perfect accuracy is not the issue here it’s more about effect and I just eyeballed it. But then again imperfection  comes very naturally to me!!

 

then cut off the corner

 

and iron back the corner so it’s now a 3.5″ square, trimming if necessary

 

Now lay out your blocks and sew together  to make a bow tie block and then make 4.

By putting 4 of these bow tie units you get the larger block as shown below

Now please repeat the process to make a second large block. Any questions please don’t hesitate to call me or email me.

I try but don’t always succeed to get these quilts finished within 4 months. So hopefully if you can get them to me by the end of the month and there aren’t too many extra to make then we should have a finish in January. I will make sure you see it.

Don’t hesitate to shout up if it doesn’t sent make sense or the maths gremlins have crept in!