August Bees and Sunflowers Completed

This post is the follow-up quilting of the assembly of the August Bees and Sunflowers post from 9/15/25. I usually need to have my quilts mellow a few days before the inspiration as to how to FMQ them strikes me. This is the third banner I have completed from the Shabby Fabrics' Pieceful Patchwork series. Each banner finished at 31" x 31". This "Let it mellow for a few days" technique has worked for me on the previous two banners.

Bees
I knew once I saw that glittery, lacy fabric for the wings that I wanted to FMQ them as feathers. A favorite resource of mine is a Hooked on Feathers book ©2008 by Sally Terry, an oldie but goodie. Her technique eliminates the need to backtrack, often a source of an untidy look for a learning quilter of feathers. Then I was inspired to FMQ the background with my go-to four-petal motif, modifying it to flow around the bee, not over her. (Fact: All worker bees are female. They are the ones flying around pollinating.) I use an Angela Walters Slim® ruler only for the straight midlines on the petals, stitching the curves freeform. At first I was trying to avoid the antennae but when that proved awkward I sewed over them; the overlying stitch or two is barely visible. I was fretting for nothing. Finally, I had to decide the head and body. I slept on it and awoke with the idea to put a simple heart (2½") on her head  and one (3½") on her body using Good Measure® Heart templates by Amanda Murphy. I chose a pale yellow thread throughout, mainly to coordinate with the sunflowers. By sheer dumb luck, however, the color choice does show up well on the black head and striped body of the bee. Pale yellow does not jump out on the wings but then it's the texture, more than the pattern, that I wanted to show off the glam. Besides, I got my feather practice. The quilting pattern shows up much better on the reverse side.

Here is the book resource I used, followed by a photo of the heart and straight rulers I used for the bees.

Sunflowers
For the sunflowers I decided on the background and petals first. I used the same four petal motif as around the bees but eliminated the central "X" that helps find a center. Each motif's center was pretty much defined by the piecing. Plus there were so many straight diagonal lines introduced with the petals, I decided less was more. For the quasi-round brown center of the sunflower, I wanted to emphasize the concept of many, many seeds. I really loved the diagonal plaid fabric with a bit of glitter provided for that brown center. I've always love those images where parallel curved lines intersection other parallel curved lines at angles and give a 3-D effect, called Curved Cross-Hatching. I wanted to try doing that technique. I used an HQ Half-Circle Template and the theory worked fine. I learned however, that the effort shows up better on a solid. My pretty center fabric was somewhat obscured instead of enhanced. Oh, well. At least my efforts show up on the reverse side and I got some practice. Pebbles would have been a better choice but, as I have admitted before, I am terrible at pebbles.

Here is the HQ Half-Circle Template I used for the cross-hatching. The yellow tape across the top was my indicator to help me equally space those parallel circle arcs along two orthogonal directions. I used the outer edge, 12" diameter, as my guide. Beneath the half-circle arc is shown the HQ-Multi Clamshells tool that I used for scallops around the bee block, discussed in the following sashing section.

Border and Sashing

With the bee and sunflower blocks quilted I turned my attention to the green plaid sashing. I did a shallow scallop around each bee block (lower right area of image), sizing its width to mate with the petal motif spacing and sizing its height to be noticeably curved. In the outer sunflower print border I took my FMQ cue from the dashed straight-line in the background behind the sunflowers. I stitched jagged straight lines lined up with the dashed ones, leaving the sunflowers free of stitching so they would pop.

The height of the scallop on the bee blocks extended it too far into the narrow sashing to allow a similar curve on the sunflower blocks. A similar scallop would overlap with the scallops around the bee block scallops. I suppose this overlap is totally acceptable as in an egg and dart design (as shown in two stages of overlap in the next image) but I did not know if I was up to such planning and precision, especially in such a limited width.  So I opted for a simple straight edge in the sashing around the sunflower blocks. The contrast framing sets each pair of blocks apart as different from the other.

Finishing Details
The sleeve called only for a 3" wide strip of fabric, so I was able to make it from the same fabric as the backing. A directed by the instructions, I attached the sleeve to the top of the banner before adding the binding. I also added my grosgrain ribbon labels and the hanging sleeve before attaching my binding. Keeping it short, I put only my initials, banner month, and completion year on one label. Keeping it simple, I put a descriptive, if unimaginative, name on the other label, Bees and Sunflowers. This time I attached the brown binding from the front by machine and wrapped it around to the back to finish, hand sewing invisibly. The banner is small enough it did not take long to take make the extra effort for hand sewing. I did not want another machine stitching line distracting from the bias vibe angles of the plaid binding fabric. I learned my lesson from the sunflower centers.

The completed Pieceful Patchwork banner for August is shown hanging on the special heart scroll holder I bought solely for these monthly banners. I have just the space reserved for this 31" x31" wall hanging and swapped the June wallhanging out it for the newly finished August one. For completeness I have also shown an image of the reverse side. Since this is now three banners in a row I've made, I think it best if I switch to another project lest I get bored and disgruntled. I will leave August Bees and Sunflowers up. Sometime in the future I may be able to synchronize the banner on the wall with the appropriate month of the year. At least August is somewhat closer to September than June was.

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.

Third Saturday of July 2021

The theme for "Hang Your Quilt Day" this July was American patriotic, which I loosely interpreted as Americana. I wanted a change from red, white, and blue and for some reason sunflowers alway make me think of Americana. On the left is my newly completed Sunflowers. In the middle is an old wallhanging from June 2004. The third item on the right is not a quilt, but a tablecloth. It fits in with my sunflower Americana theme so I hung it with the other two.

Sunflowers 38½" x 53½"
Sunflowers is made from twelve Block of the Month kits from April this year. Yesterday's post dated 7/16/21 has more details about the block assembly and free motion quilting

Debbie Mumm inspired 40" x 40"
This wall hanging measures 40" x 40" and was completed in June of 2004 using a 2" grid of squares. It was born of a mystery project where once a week for four weeks participants were given a clue: make a certain number of HSTs, join them into a certain number of pinwheels, cut a certain number of background squares, assemble two style of block and alternate them to produce a secondary pattern. The background was a tonal collection of beige plaids and stripes. Although many squares do make for a lot of background piecing I like the overall mottled effect. Sunflowers were popular at a time when I was enamored with the designer Debbie Mumm. Though the barn red, mellow gold, and muted green colorway is from a different era, I still love that it has those cheery sunflowers sprinkled throughout which justified my adding it to this month's display. More details are included in my post for 3/31/2014.

Checkered table cloth
Some fabric is too cute to cutup. I hemmed these 3 yards of 54" wide fabric to use as a table cloth. I could not bear to slice up the borders with bicycles, sunflowers, lemonade, and watermelon. Because of its Americana feel and sunflowers, I gave myself permission to add it to in July's "Hang Your Quilt Day".

Hang Your Quilt Day Beginnings

Beginning April 2020, my quilt guild members began a tradition of hanging quilts in the front of their homes on the third Saturday of the month as a source of enjoyment for the community and as a thank you for the essential workers during the pandemic. My initial post about this practice is dated 4/22/20. I am pleased to see the displays are still going on and even more pleased that the pandemic restrictions have eased up.

Sunflower Quilt

Having just come off a one year tour doing Block of the Month for my guild, my co-chair and I had a dozen leftover unsold kits for a sunflower block for April. Twelve were was a few too many to add as giveaways to the winners, so I bought them myself to "quickly whip up" into a bright wall hanging.

Each block consists of a modified nine-patch block made from a central snowball block surrounded by four truncated QSTs and four corner squares. The original block pattern came from the Quilting Daily website and called sunrise star. Here is a summary of the basic construction steps from a sample practice block I made. First I made a central snowball block in brown and orange for the sunflower center.

Next I made four QSTs from the green background color, the orange of the inner sunflower petals, and the yellow of the outer petals.

Then I offset cut the four QSTs and assembled them about the central snowball, filling in the corners with four background squares. I saved the truncated edges of the QSTs to make a border later.

The kits for the monthly BOM were made up with stronger, more vibrant colors instead of the more subdues one of the sample. Once I pieced the 12 kits, I planned to assemble them in a 3 x 4 arrangement.

To add a bit of visual relief between the main body and the border, I added some striped fabric inserts. By varying the width of the inserts on the sides from those on the top/bottom I was able to make the corners come out "right", meaning I forced the border to be symmetric rounding the corners.

Since I wanted to keep the FMQ simple without fastidious ruler work, I used my favorite square-fill from the Shape by Shape free motion quilting book by Angela Walters (square #7) in the teal/green spaces with a King Tut 40 wt 3-ply variegated Fahl Green (an Egyptian clover) and then stitched free-form arcs around the four sided yellow "petals" of the sunflower with 3-ply 40 wt Essential cotton thread in Marigold #21171.

Hmmm... what to do in the brown centers of the sunflowers? I used my Coats & Clark Star 100% cotton thread in a matching brown. Ideally I wanted the bumpy texture of pebbles but I am not very skilled at that FMQ pattern. That meant I needed the practice. So I did one center in pebbles and decided it was too much work and did not show up very much anyway. I did the second center with a spiral pattern and a third center with a wavy grid. I decided I would do different centers in the sunflowers, four of each pattern. I did six sunflower centers one evening. They turned out fine (even if the dark brown thread barely showed up) and I returned to do the following six the next day.

The tension gremlins or lint goblins invaded my Sweet Sixteen overnight, or else the desire for perfection bug infected me. When stitching the remaining six sunflower centers, I saw some tiny dots of the pale thread peaking up to the front surface from the back and tweaked my tension, just a bit to eliminate them. Big Whoops! Four of my sunflower centers wound up with a huge mess on the back with lines of loopy brown thread snarls. So dismayed, I did not think to take a photo before I sheared off the bulk of the brown loopy "fur"; these photos show my progress as I snipped and picked at the pebbles, spiral, and wavy grid, in that photo order, to remove the remaining brown top thread remnants. My counter top was covered with those brown thread "hair" clippings much like the floor of a barber shop. The dark fuzz reminded me of my Wooly Willy magnetic hair toy from when I was a kid. Even more discouraging was the fact that I would need to FMQ that spiral and wavy line grid once again. I am considering leaving in that two pebbles ones on the back. They do not look so bad, perhaps... just like a scattering of poppy seeds. Oh, wait this is a sunflower, not a poppy. Eh, close enough.

I have lost my initial fear of free-motion quilting because I have learned from experience that most any errors can be plucked out. That does not imply however, that it is not painstaking to do so. After shearing off those brown thread loops, it took me longer to remove their remains with curved-blade snips and tweezers than it did to FMQ 12 brown centers, 96 yellow petals, and the green background, combined.  So much for "quickly whip up".  I am reminded of the saying "Man plans and God laughs". In honor of my Wooly Willy adventure, I considered naming this quilt SUNFLOWER SAM where SAM is an acronym for Such A Mess. It has a nice alliterate sound to it, like Sunbonnet Sue, and the name source could be my secret – except to those of you who read this post. Do I really need such a reminder though? Nah. I chickened out and named this quilt simply SUNFLOWERS.

I stitched scallops in the orange border and stitched parallel white lines piano-border-style in the striped inserted bands. I did use a scalloped ruler and a straight ruler for those border details. 

With my domestic Pfaff, I embroidered the labels on of grosgrain ribbon and then bound SUNFLOWERS in orange fabric that matched the outer peaked border.

The consistent thread color on the back of the quilt is a putty-colored, blah color called Stone that my Block of the Month co-chair gave me as a gift. She told me it blends in with everything. She was so right! It is 50 wt 2-ply Aurifil 100% cotton and it flowed like a dream in my bobbin thread. Thanks Liz! You have expanded my repertoire of favored threads. The two round shadowy regions are where my tension drifted on the pebbles.  I suspect the brownish area can be detected in the galloping horse test; i.e., if you can’t see the mistake when riding by on a horse at full gallop, then do not attempt to fix the "error".  I think those areas would be visible – I did not actually test from a galloping horse – but still I chose not to re-do those them, warning myself not to let perfect be the enemy of good. 

SUNFLOWERS finished 38½" wide by 53½" tall and the back is not visible unless you turn it over to look. This quilt was never intended as a county fair entry, anyway. It still makes me think of a field of cheery sunflowers and those brown spots are pockets of earth peeking through.