February and March Bee Blocks

This is my fourth year in Stash Bee and I still love the excitement of finding out what block I'll be making on the first of each month. Queen Anna (February) asked for a bookshelf block to make her son, age 4, a quilt for his big-boy bed.  She asked that each block have a theme and an object.  I picked trains/transportation/vehicles.  I used my Accuquilt train die to cut out the engine.

Queen Marie (March) asked for "X and +" blocks in white, gray, and spring greens.  I hadn't made this block before and was surprised at how quickly they came together.

Bee Inspired, the online group that formed from some of us in the New Bloggers Blog Hop group (2016), is not doing a traditional bee this year.  Instead, there are a few different projects and each of us can choose which ones to do.  Some of them are charity quilts where the hostess picks a block and anyone who wants (including those not originally in Bee Inspired!) can send a block or more to be made into a charity quilt.

Irene designed a block for a quilt that will be donated to the Carolina Hurricane Quilts project.  Irene loves paper piecing so of course, her block is paper pieced.  But I don’t love paper piecing, so she said the strips could be pieced traditionally.  So I made some strip sets and then just paper pieced the last step.  Here are the blocks I sent her:

I was the hostess for the first charity quilt of the year and I asked for boat blocks.  I made a few extra to get to a nice round number and it was only after I finished this one that I realized I had used checks, stripes, and polka dots in the same block.  It's like the scrappy block trifecta!