At the May guild meeting a brief, very unscientific survey was taken about future BOMs. A summary of the results are as follows:
Block Style
The preference for modern traditional blocks was pretty much tied with improv blocks. Not a surprise for a modern guild. Coming in a very close second was paper piecing. Apparently we are NOT fans of appliqué!
Color
We go for brights in a big way! Some requests for blues. Some rejection for browns and civil war reproductions. Again, not a surprise for modern quilters.
Background
The majority of us gave white backgrounds as our first preference. Several others also listed scrappy low volume and a couple suggested black.
We’d like to learn/avoid
Here was a bit of a dilemma. Many wanted to learn paper piecing. A few wanted to avoid it! We also had some requests for strip piecing and working with curves.
Hopefully in the coming months we’ll be able to please everyone. Not everyone every month maybe, but with luck and your input, I hope to make sure everyone likes, maybe even loves, at least one month’s block choice.
June BOM
June’s Block has four of the popular factors - brights, white background, simple paper piecing for those who asked to learn, and input. The input is from Brenda, who said she’d just used a paper piecing pattern in her StashBee quilt. I’d already looked at using the same pattern for this month so it seemed like serendipity.
These little birds are quick and easy. They finish at 5” x 6” and making just one will give you a chance to win the whole set! But once you start, it’s easy to make a flock and increase your win potential.
Colors:
Let’s do them in brights with white and little black bird legs. I made the samples with solid/solid, solid bird/print wing, print bird/solid wing and finally print bird/print wing. I think they all work. Go as bright as you dare and make it look like summer in South Florida.
Pattern:
The pattern can be found here. Perhaps even more helpful, Brenda has done the sample work for us on the Stash Bee Blog. Go check out here. She's done a wonderful job on the ‘how to’s’ and since I’m the world’s laziest quilter it’s a pleasure to send you to her work.
I’ll have copies of the pattern at the June meeting if you need them but it’s pretty easy to print the pattern yourself from the McCalls site. Just make sure your printer prints at actual size so the final measure is 5 1/2” by 6 1/2”.
If you’d like the reversed bird, I’ll have that pattern too but in case you can’t make the meeting, it’s simple to reverse. I just turned the paper over and traced the pattern on the back side. Follow the same steps and the bird faces the opposite direction.
Linda