~ Block One ~ Save the Bees ~ GIVEAWAY

***GIVEAWAY CLOSED***

 Yeah!  It's finally here!  The first block of the Save the Bee's Free Block of the month.  If your just hearing of this block of the month and would like to join in the fun, you can find all the details by CLICKING HERE.  After joining in the fun and getting your first free block you can share your creations in the Sew Quilty Friends Facebook Group.

As soon as I heard the theme of this years BOM I knew it was for me.  My husband is a beekeeper and I've said for years a bee quilt was on my bucket list of quilts to make.

Instead of  making the blocks into a quilt I decided to use the blocks to make wall hangings for the studio.  

In true Lea Anne style these blocks will be made with Lakehouse Drygoods fabrics.  Over the years I've collected a fairly large stash of the discontinued fabrics.  In the block 1 pattern it called for adding stitches to each petal.  By fussy cutting the hearts on the outer petals and the stripes on the inner petals I gave the petals the whimsical look without doing any stitching.   

In order to get my hearts to fit inside each petal the patter had to be altered just a tiny bit.  The image below shows how I made two templates from the original pattern.  The templates were made from 3 layers of freezer paper.  For more information about how to make freezer paper templates CLICK HERE

Normally I would use the freezer paper templates for turned edge applique.  But these blocks will be made using raw edge applique so the templates made tracing onto Heat N Bond Lite a little bit easier.  They also were used to trace the shape around the hearts before cutting them out of the fabric.

In the original pattern all the petals are not uniform.  So my flower head ended up a little larger than the pattern.  It's not noticeable until I layer the pattern on top of my block.  Below shows the difference in size.

For the half square triangles in the border of the block I decided to use some scrap flippy corners left over from another quilt.  You can see the quilt here.  The blue basket sets beside my sewing machine.  When making a quilt with Flippy corners I sew an extra diagonal line to make a bonus HST.  No scraps!  See how to make the bonus HST's here. 

They needed a little trimming down. 

A true quarter inch binding was made for the the binding.  I like the look of a smaller binding on a small quilt.  However I did have a bit of trouble getting it to the right size.  You can read about it here and download an print a free double fold binding chart.

The backing fabric is a scrap from a previous project.  

I love how this little wall hanging turned out using nothing but scraps! OOPS...the background fabric was a new fat quarter.

Another alteration to the pattern was using a striped fabric for the Bee body instead of  the little bitty applique or stitching the stripes.

All machine stitching, no hand work at all except for sewing the binding to the back of the quilt.

I think the whimsical flower is my favorite part of this block.  

So let's get to the fun stuff...The GIVEAWAYS!  Each blogger in the blog hop will be giving away a copy of The Splendid Sampler book courtesy of Martingale.

  Make sure you visit each featured blog for more chances to win.  The list bloggers below.

The Crafty Quilter

Podunk Pretties you are here

The Quilting Nook

The Sewing Loft

Flamingo Toes

Kathy's Quilts

Freemotion by the River

A Quilting Life

To enter for the giveaway here at Podunk Pretties follow the directions below.  Giveaway will end 8/12/2018

~ Lea Anne ~

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