August Bees and Sunflowers

The Pieceful Patchwork kit for August by Shabby Fabrics has bees and sunflowers, all in warm, golden honey tones. I cut all the fabrics per the instructions. Per the directions each piece is labeled with a letter and the intended block, Bee or Sunflower. An improvement to the pattern would be to not repeat letters. I solved that issue by using different color Alphabitties for the two blocks, pink for the Bee and blue for the Sunflower, sorting them on my sewing themed melamine dedicated tray set.  A rectangular tray is for each block and the larger square tray is for the sashing and border fabric strips, which have sizes but not letter designations.

Cutting

Bee Block
I assembled two bee blocks. The striped body was sewn in strips and then cut on a 45°. The wings are out of a glittery fabric that is so pretty, having a light lacy look. Thinking ahead, I already am getting inspired to FMQ them with a feather motif in each. The head has a nice detail of sprouting two antennae to be embroidered in a back stitch. In the next photo they are drawn in but not yet stitched

I have not embroidered in years; my hoop and floss have long been buried somewhere in my craft closet. The floss container was obvious and in my face when I opened the folding doors, but the task to find a hoop would be daunting; I seriously considered running out to the store and buying a new one. But I stayed steadfast, went through several plastic bins before eventually indeed finding a hoop. The effort was not wasted. In the process I uncovered a lot of stuff I was hanging onto for no defendable reason. I found several candidates for donation. I was determined not to be deterred from sewing those antennae, so I set the unearthed items aside with a note to self to deal with them before the end of the month. 

I used a micron marker to trace the antennae from the photo in the pattern. Wisely, an enlarged section of the bee's head had been printed at full scale so there was no guesswork on what size and exactly where to place those antennae. Seeing all that floss in my closet was a reminder but not required for this project. Enough black floss was sent with the kit to embroider the antennae on a whole hive's colony of bees. Two strands of floss was recommended but I used three strand to make the fine antennae just a tad thicker. 

Sunflower Block

Learning from the Bee blocks, I transferred all the pieces for the Sunflower blocks to a larger square tray so I could see all the letters at once. For the sunflower petals there are eight 3½" squares that are made up of a mint background piece and two golds. As in the case with this series these squares are made up oversized and then trimmed down uniformly. I goofed for a couple by trimming them before pressing open which made the squares too small. Instead of being 3½", two squares were slightly bigger that 3". I had enough extra gold fabric that with some head scratching cutting and pieced pieces I could recover. As it turns out I did not need to used the pieced pieces but I kept them as orphan blocks

A Sunflower block is shown in the next photo. The points came out great. I was pretty lucky considering my unthinking goof.

Orphan Blocks
Here are four orphan blocks I have from trimmings. The black and gold one on the left is from the cut-off corners of the two bee blocks. It is far from perfect but unique enough I am hanging on to it for a bit. It is crooked but measures ~ 6½". In the middle are two pinwheels made from cut off corners from the bee's wings. The teeny-tiny one is 2" square and the larger one 3½"; that lacy, glittery fabric was too appealing to toss. On the far right is a 5½" block made from those four pieced and recovered blocks from my sunflower trimming mistake. On a closer look, two of the four larger triangle gold corners are from pieced fabric. (Spoiler alert — the two left corners are pieced.) There is a fair amount of leftover fabric, too but I did not take the time to catalog it. Someday, maybe, in the future, in the far future, I will finally figure out a scrap management system. For now collecting orphan blocks is the level of effort I am willing to expend. The challenge of sewing them up from trimmings is fun.

Assembly

The two Bee blocks and two Sunflower blocks are assembled along with the green plaid sashing and sunflower print border. As is my habit, this top has to sit and mellow for a while as I decide how to quilt it. In the interim I will make the binding and labels. Hopefully by the time I have cut the backing and batting and sandwiched it all, I will have a direction to proceed.

May Roses and Pansies Completed

This post is the follow-up quilting of the assembly of the May Roses and Pansies post from 8/14/25. This is the second banner I have completed from the Shabby Fabrics' Pieceful Patchwork series.

Pansies
Full, four-petaled motifs would fill in the block proper nicely. This motif is one on my go-to choices, I used it on my June Strawberries quilt post dated 9/6/25. As for the two HSTs with leaves, I wanted to add parallel lines to look like veining. Learning from my strawberry blossom post, I took a best guess at the direction of veins running from the source stem  and made the parallel lines vertical on the lower leaf and horizontal on the upper leaf. The directionality is somewhat camouflaged by the gingham fabric but a least I know I made a somewhat logical decision.

Roses
Undecided on how to quilt the yellow rose, I did the leaves first while waiting for inspiration to hit me.  For the central stem of each leaf, I sewed the spine from corner to corner, even though this deviated from a 45 degree line. This skewed approach saved me from having to deal with weird corner voids and let the veins radiate horizontally and vertically from the central spine. I used the pindots as a quasi-guide and free-formed the squiggles. For the white background however I was stricter and spaced the diagonals equidistant with the aid of a ruler. My final "aha" moment was for the yellow rose. I remembered I owned Amanda Murphy's Good Measure Every Daisy template set of four flower sizes. I quilted the largest one first, and then thought I'd insert the smaller ones concentric within. When I tried to outline the next one down in size, the template slipped and slid all over and was hard to control. Hmmm. The largest one had been manageable with the non-slip backing it came with. I picked out the sloppy mess. Then I added some extra sandpaper grippers to the back of the third one down in size and it worked beautifully. I decided not to press my luck with the second largest and the smallest. My bamboo batting can be quilted as spaced out as 8 inches so two concentric daisies were sufficient.

Here are the rulers I used for the rose and pansy blocks. I am not a slave to a specific brand. They all have their strong points. I rarely use the large HQ Right Angle ruler to guide my stitches. It is just too large for my hand to hold securely while stitching on my sit-down HQ Sweet Sixteen long arm. But it is great for setting right angles and I can use just the corner for zig zags on borders. I used it to mark my position where my point fell on the side edges of the rose block. I used the shorter Angela Walter SLIM ruler for stitching the actual straight lines. It has a gripping back and, with markings both in white and black, it is very versatile. Though hard to see in the photo, Slim also has 45 degree markings that help me stay tilted just the right amount throughout my diagonal grid. Also shown are the two sizes I used of Amanda Murphy's Daisy four template set.

The next photo is a quick comparison of the quilting patterns I chose for the two flowers. Sashing and borders are yet to be stitched.

Sashing and Borders
The inner sashing is rather narrow but leaving it without stitching seemed unfinished. Plus the sashing is a very dark purple, and I thought white thread would be distracting and purple thread ... why bother since it would not show up? As a compromise, I stitched a few arcs, six per side of a block or basically half the 3x3 setting. These arcs I stitched using the blocks themselves as a uniform spacing tool. I did use the curved edge of a HQ Versatool ruler for aid in sewing smooth contours and uniform sizing. Any curve would have sufficed but this one was a convenient size for my hand. For the mini floral print outer border, I stitched free form wishbones, referring to Angela Water's YouTube guide Machine Quilting Border Corners to navigate around the corners.

Finishing Details
I added my grosgrain ribbon labels. I also added the hanging sleeve before attaching my binding. On the Strawberries kit for June, I made the sleeve in the same fabric as the binding per the instructions. It shows up rather glaringly on the the back. For the June kit, I made the hanging sleeve out of the same fabric as the backing. Enough extra backing fabric was provided in the kit that I could do so. The sleeve is well camouflaged along that upper edge; and, by the way, so is my FMQ on the backing. I much prefer this same fabric option and will repeat making the sleeve out of the backing fabric whenever there is enough. I intend to make other months of these Shabby Fabric Pieceful Patchwork kits.

Voila! Another month of Pieceful Patchwork banners is completed. It is shown in the next photo hanging on a special heart scroll holder.

I thoroughly enjoy these 31" x 31" whimsical, interesting kits from Shabby Fabrics. They give me a reasonably sized opportunity to practice my FMQ, while granting me the satisfaction of quickly completing a project. There is enough repetition to get better, but not enough repetition to get bored.