My first Quilting Bee :)

Thank you so much for all your lovely comments on my 'new' sewing room - I showed them all to DH and he was really chuffed :)

So, today I got to sew up there for the first time in over a month ... yay! And just in time. I have been invited to join a small virtual quilting bee organised by Maria @ sew love to sew. I haven't taken part in a Bee before so was a little nervous when Fran @ PatchyRose emailed me to see if I was up for it. Maria has done a great job organising it all and has kept it very simple - just as well with me involved!

This is how it will work: we each make our own strip at a width of 40.5" (depth and design to be decided by ourselves) and then post it to the next person on the list who adds their depth and design to it and so on until it comes home to you with all 6 strips attached into a quilt top. Maria is encouraging us not to buy new fabric but choose from our stash.

So, I set about creating my strip today. I want this to be a no pressure, fun experience so I adopted tried to adopt a more casual approach than usual to my fabric choices and block designs. I still 'auditioned' different fabrics ... I have a Pom Pom Layer Cake I've wanted to cut into for like forever, then I thought about using bold, darker accent colours like navy and black or a flower theme maybe or ... oh, this was me being not so 'casual' after all!

Hmmm, moving onto block design; that might make it easier to choose from all those colours. Now I have all my books on easy display and a little seating area to comfortably read them in, I picked up a few and perused ... and paused and perused ... and ... an hour has now passed ... oh my!

Sometimes you can over-engineer things, don't you think? JFDI, Jennifer, JFDI ... so I did. Here's my strip - 8" x 40.5" - a few different blocks in yellow and PINK! Well, are you really surprised: 

Nell just had to join me ... we re-covered my ironing block yesterday - she tells me she was just trying it out:

I pass my strip onto Amy next week and I will be receiving Fran's and we will have 6 weeks in each round so plenty of time to choose fabrics and make blocks for the next strip.

Here's all the lovely ladies:

Maria @ sew love to sew

Amy @ Cloud CouCou Crafts

Fran @ PatchyRose 

Julie @ Mack and Mabel

Sarah @ Quilt Candy 

And me :)

I am so looking forward to getting to know my fellow Bees better and to working on their strips - it's quite exciting, hey! And Maria even designed a little button for us: