The Big Quilt Bee

Recently, I was asked if I would be interested in creating a design specifically for an upcoming event. Of course, I eagerly said yes and got straight to work.  The Canadian Quilters' Association will be holding a Big Quilt Bee at their national conference in 2017. You can find out more about it here

This bee will appear on posters at quilt shops, web pages and a variety social media sites and who knows where else.  When I design something for a specific purpose I always keep quiet about it until the end user sets it free......I saw it land a few places last evening so I thought I should be safe to show it here.

I did a few different versions for the organization to use (wanted to give them options....turned out they liked them all)     :-)

CQA designed a poster to feature him on (this is just the top of it)

You will see a black and yellow version winging its way through cyberspace

And, because the Big Quilt Bee initiative involves quilts made up of "slab" blocks that will be sent in by quilters across the country, I designed these blocks to accompany the bee.

I am excited to play a small part in this project.

A quick note about the design process......this was hand drawn on my iPad mini using the Concepts app and my Pencil by Paper 53

Backing, Batting and Stitch

This quilt has been a completed top for a number of months now.
The first obstacle to getting on with the process was my batting. You see, the quilt measures 106" x 92".....my roll of batting is only 63" wide.
So I rolled out 2 twelve foot long pieces and carefully joined them together

for the backing, I used a duvet cover I found in a clearance bin ..... it washed and dried beautifully....so at $10, this 100% cotton duvet was "re-engineered" and turned into a perfect backing piece  ( in order to achieve the necessary size, I needed to deconstruct and incorporate the pillow sham as well)

here are the 3 layers ready to be combined.....trouble is, I do not have a large enough space anywhere in my home to fully lay this thing out. Luckily, I did have the opportunity to use a room in a church basement

Batting  (this piece is roughly 12' x 13')

the backing ......would you have guessed it was a transformed duvet and pillow sham?
once the layers were all assembled, trimmed and basted, I next wanted to create clean edges for the large amount of handling that will happen as I work on this project

This was done by turning the backing edge over, folded to the front to create a sort of wide "temporary" binding

rolled once

rolled twice

pinned and ready to long baste

Yeah, this does take a little extra time, BUT, it encases the batting and gives me a nice clean working edge......since I am hand quilting this thing I don't want to be constantly dealing with stuff sticking to the exposed batting and vice versa

here it is all ready for the stitching.......to the left of this set up I have a TV, DVD and Media box.....I can binge watch some shows as I stitch along

Since my goal in making this quilt was to try to use supplies I already had, I am stitching with the 12 wt variegated Aurifil thread I won a few years ago. It is perfect for doing this "Big Stitch" quilting.

An earlier post about this particular project can be found here

National Colouring Book Day?

Apparently (according to the Internet) it is National Colouring Book Day.....who knew?  So I thought I would join in by sharing this as a free colouring page

If you would like to colour this image, you can grab the printable PDF file here 
Enjoy!