Finished 4x5 Bee Quilt

At the beginning of 2012, Sukie wrangled me into joining the 4x5 bee as she was taking over as the head caretaker. I signed up for one round, but then life got busy and I didn't commit to any other rounds. As 2012 was coming to a close, I decided I better do one final round so the lonely blocks I received earlier that were sitting in a drawer could join others and be made into a quilt.

For Christmas 2011, I had gifted my sister and one of her daughters quilts. I don't remember what exactly he said, but my brother-in-law left me with the impression that he wanted a quilt too. As I was trying to come up with handmade gifts for family for Christmas in 2012, I figured this 4x5 bee quilt would be great for my brother-in-law.

I had received 10 blocks (5 from each round I participated in). Since I had a red sheet on hand and didn't want to piece the 10th block into the backing, I asked the mister to pick his favorite (top middle in this photo) so I can make him something with it. The rest of the blocks were pieced into the top.


I needed to make the quilt a bit bigger so I added a border of Laurie Wisbrun's Perfectly Perched that had the aqua and red color scheme I was going for.



Like I mentioned before, I used a solid red sheet for the backing. For the quilting, I tried stippling for the first time (in the border). It was hard not to want to cross over those lines, but I'm sure it'll get easier with practice. The rest of the quilt is my typical meandering loops. There's one blank space in the quilting because I didn't want to quilt over the hexagon block since it had some hand stitching in it.



For the binding, I used one of the swirl prints from the Perfectly Perched line.

The quilt measures approximately 56x62 inches.