Wandering Quilt – honey bee quilt – the Journal, mine

Friday was the day to finally get this quilt into it’s second stage.

You might remember I mentioned that this year, January thru October, I am a member of a traveling quilt group.

Everyone starts with a starter block and on January 27th we were to send our starter group to the next person to work on.  Mine went to Susan and she will be working on it in February, while I’ll be working about hers.

My quilt was about honey bees.

Along with the quilt starter block we were to send a journal that discusses what direction we want our quilt to take, preferences on colors, fabrics, designs, and anything to inspire someone who will be working on your quilt.

I used the same journal I used for my last traveling group that I purchased here.

I did add some crochet flowers to it with hot glue, along with some buttons and it wasn’t even half full.  It’s such a lovely journal and I didn’t want it to go to waste, so I’ll be using it for this traveling group as well.  Which got me to thinking how cool it would be to have many traveling quilts all in the same journal.  So that’s the plan now.

The journal pages are pretty similar to my first blog post about this quilt.  And all those pictures you see in it are mostly pictures I printed off from pinterest and glued down into the journal.  There are a few original pictures as well

You can see my pinterest board about this quilt here.

I also needed a signature block for all the women who will be working on my quilt to sign each month, so I’m using this dresden below.

Note that background fabric!  I am in love with the delicateness of it.  It’s a Bari J print.

I’m not certain how I will be adding this to the quilt.  I originally wanted the dresden on the front of the quilt with everyone’s names on it, but I made the dresden too small so that is not happening.  And I ended up putting on this background fabric and telling everyone to sign the white fabric instead of the actual dresden.

I can’t use it on the back of the quilt, bc it will look off with it quilted on top of so I’m not sure what I will end up doing with it.

I guess I’ll have ten months to ponder this.

Sending gifts is uneccessary, but I had some extra dresdens laying about.  I put this one in a hoop and it is for Susan to keep.  I like hoops on walls.  I need to make those more.

And I looooove that fabric above as well (with the horses).  That is Summer Ride by Sarah Jane.  I’ve also got it in red.

I was talking with Tara on Instagram about scraps.  She likes to use very itty bitty pieces of scraps and do all sorts of amazing things with them.  Anyway, one of the things she uses them for is card making, so I took a teeny tiny piece of fabric (the flower) scrap that I had saved just because it was too pretty to toss and I found something to do with it OR Tara showed me what to do with it.

I will definitely be stitching them to cards again.  And it was just a simple zig zag stitch.

So along with my starter block, journal and Susan’s gift, I sent some fabric I’d like to see go into the quilt, my signature block with a Tulip fabric marker, and some appliqued flowers like you see in my starter block.

I’m really excited to see where this quilt goes.  My part with it is over for now and I won’t see it again until October when it comes back to me quilt top finished.

Susan’s starter block should be arriving to me any day now.  It’s going to be all about trees.  More on that later.

xo, Melanie