Siblings Together Quilting Bee

Hi, I'm Mary a member of the Siblings Together Quilt Bee and I blog over here, you're welcome to come over and see what I'm up to. When the opportunity arose to join the STQB I immediately jumped at the chance. I'd already made 7 quilts over the previous 2 years for this amazing charity and was keen to continue my involvement. You can read more about the quilt drive in this post, AND you can see one of the children wrapped up in one of the quilts that I made 2 years, it brings tears to my eyes every time. It is great to put my sewing skills to use to help others. You too can get involved, make a quilt, a block, donate fabric or wadding, no gesture is too small. Siblings Together promotes positive contact between brothers and sisters separated by Foster care, kinship care, Residential care or adoption. If you want to read more about the charity visit their website to read some amazing stories (don't forget your tissues) and donate money directly if that's more your thing.

Moda very kindly supply a FQ bundle each month, we get to choose from upcoming ranges, so when the time came for me to make my choice I spent ages drooling over the fabrics on their site. Eventually I reached a decision and soon enough this wonderful bundle arrived at my house:

  It's Barcelona by Zen Chic. One of my reasons for picking this was because it had a much more masculine feel than many of the other lines, I always worry about the boys being left out and 3 out of the 7 quilts I've already made were with masculine/unisex fabrics. Oh and once upon a time, before children my husband and I had a wonderful holiday in Barcelona and the fabric was a lovely reminder of it. It took me a while to get my head around choosing a block for my month, there were a couple of options but I eventually went with string blocks using Ashley's tutorial. I was actually asking bee members to make 4 blocks 10.5" square and stitch them together:

 

It was wonderful to receive back gorgeous blocks to piece together.

   

 I had to wait a long time once the quilt was finished to photograph it. The weather was wet, cold and very grey so it wasn't until the end of December and a sunny day when we got out to the local park for a photography session. 

   

 The generous sponsor of the backing for my month was the wonderful Marmalade Fabrics, I chose Comma in Swinging Slate for the backing, it's also by Zen Chic and looks great. You can see the simple quilting in this photo, stitching in the ditch of the diagonals.

   

 It was a joy to put together, I hope it will bring comfort to its new owner.

   

 Thanks very much to all the sponsors who have made this bee possible, if you 'need' fabric it's definitely worth checking them out:

And on top of all that the generous folk at Lady Sew and Sew supplied wadding for the quilts.

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Thanks Lynne for having me today, please take time to think about any contribution you can make to help these children.