Nine patches and pretty fabric!

Last night I got to work on my October blocks for Brioni for Busy Bees. I feel so much more in control now that I don’t have as many bees…it was really hard to keep everything straight. I still have plenty going on, so I like to finish blocks as soon as I can for my bees. I get fabric and I start thinking…and then I start working.

Brioni sent us some adorable fabric I hadn’t seen before called Ellie Fun and asked us to make two nine patch blocks with the outside 4 corners as white fabric. We could do whatever we wanted for the other five blocks. So I put my thinking cap on and came up with this block using a pattern that I’ve been playing with for a while.

Angela Pingel bee nine patch blocks

This little block took a bit of work. I showed my husband and asked him if it looked hard to do. He said that it looked nice…not quite what I was looking for but I took the compliment none the less. LOL. I guess if it doesn’t look hard then I made it look easy. 😉

Angela Pingel bee nine patch blocks

I had an assortment of fabric left over for the second block but not enough of anything to do a totally symmetric design like the first one. So I turned to the old standard of piecing together scraps of fabrics in a hopefully pleasing arrangement and creating an impromptu pattern.

Angela Pingel bee nine patch blocks

Oh and have I mentioned how much I adore the polka dots in this line? No? Well I do. I ADORE them. They should take over the world. I don’t understand why they haven’t. I must have some. Darn these bees for introducing me to fabrics that I must own. Sometimes it helps get a fabric line out of my system. But just as often it makes me long for a fabric line that I had previously left untouched. It’s a love/hate relationship. Well really it’s just a love relationship but my credit card disagrees with me. 😉

Angela Pingel bee nine patch blocks

The two together are pretty cute. I think that she’ll have a very sweet quilt and I can’t wait to see all the blocks everyone will make. It’s always hard to be the first person to put your blocks out there for everyone to see because I’m never quite sure what the response will be. My husband thinks that I worry too much, but I always want to make something that the person will really be delighted to get. So I feel a bit vulnerable. Thankfully Brioni likes them, so it’s all good this time. 😉

Angela Pingel bee nine patch blocks

Angela Pingel bee nine patch blocks

As a clear lover of fabric and design, I’m part of a little group on flickr for fabric lovers to show off their fabrics and delight in others’ fabrics. Amy, one of the members, suggested that we have a weekly theme of a fabric collection and pull fabrics from our stash in all different lines to show how we would combine multiple lines. Woohoo! This is right up my ally. I’m always combining fabric lines and I love to see different ways to combine fabrics. Plus I get to take pictures of my fabric and think about interesting ways to put them together.

This week’s theme was ” a season of smiles”. The themes will all be kind of loose like this and very much open to personal interpretation. I must admit that I feel like I kind of went the obvious way and chose Christmas as my theme. But I only had one fabric that was a Christmas fabric!

Angela Pingel bee nine patch blocks

I especially love how Riley Blake’s umbrella tops look like candies you might see at Christmas time! This would definitely be a modern Christmas quilt. But the joy of this…I don’t have to do anything with these. I’m just playing! I can put the fabrics back in my stash and use them again in another combination. I think that it’s a really good exercise to get you thinking about your fabric in new ways.

I got some delightful fabric in the mail today and bought some tonight at our Modern Quilt Guild meeting…so I’ll have to share those soon. And I’m slowly but surely getting my Ravishing in Red Bee Star Blocks in. Hopefully I’ll get all 11 people to send them. You never know. 😉 I’ll show you all of them together when they are in!

3 thoughts on “Nine patches and pretty fabric!”

  1. Husbands! Looks "nice"???? The block looks wonderful and VERY HARD TO DO AND COMPLICATED! Thanks for sharing. I would love to make one of those blocks some day.

  2. I really like the pattern of the first block. And, yes, I could tell that it was hard to make right off the bat!

    That flickr group sounds fun. I would love that challenge.

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