My Bee Sampler Quilt

Hi Everyone,

As promised I am revealing my completed bee sampler today.  Please forgive the photography, though.  I wanted to take some nice photos outside, but a storm came up and then everything was wet, so I had to make do with the indoor pictures.

Here it is with the border on it.  I love the curve of the border.  I think you can see now why I didn't want to mess with the size of the star square.

Here is the center again, since the quilt laying on the floor is so distorted.

 

 

Here is another view from the side.

 

 

A detail of the border.  When I assemble the border, I was REALLY careful about the stars to make sure they were al standing up in the correct position--point up.  When I got it attached, I brought it down and laid it out and double-check everything and I did find one mistake, but it was easy to rip out as I didn't have the outer background strips on it yet.

 

 

The original pattern for this quilt was not at all patriotic.  I began it in different colors--using my Thimbleberries fabrics--but I wasn't really excited by it.  Then when we got to the rectangular area, I realized I could substitute the series of small blocks with a flag, and then the new version "clicked" in my head.  I ended up switching out some blocks that had flowers and butterflies for some substitutes like this carpenter's wheel block and another from a copy of  Quiltmakers 100.  The border was supposed to look like a flower on a vine:  if the red squares in mine were pink, and the plaid fabric was yellow, and the rest was green, it would look the way it was supposed to.  By fussy-cutting those stars, I think I was successful in detracting from the flower-look.

 

 

 

 

Now for a shameless request:  My mom has entered one of her photos in a contest.  If you have facebook, you can easily vote, if interested, by clicking on this link.

 

This is a thumbnail of her photo of bald eagles.  It really is a good picture and should win, in my opinion, but it is my mom!  Thank you very much if you are able to vote!

 

 

I hope everyone has a wonderful Fourth! 

JoAnne