The Cincinnati Modern Quilt Guild Bee Hive Swap continued over the summer, and in fact, at tonight’s meeting we hand off the last of the blocks for this session. I’m going to miss making these blocks each month. Each one was an interesting challenge and opened my eyes to new techniques and block styles. Here’s a rundown of the last three blocks I worked on.

Wanta Fanta Block

Becky found this block on the Blossom Heart Quilts blog. Becky provided the white fabric and asked us to use a different fabric print for each of the other pieces, for a completely scrappy look. The block is composed of four small blocks, two of which are pieced and two of which are paper-pieced.

When you put the four blocks together, they form the block at the top of this post. And when you put more of those blocks together, you get a cool curved effect even though all the blocks are made with straight lines.

Unfortunately, to get that effect, your piecing needs to be pretty accurate. Mine was not on the first try.

I fixed that oops. It’s still not perfect, but hopefully it will work well enough.

Four-Pointed Star

Next up is the Four-Pointed Star Shona asked us to make. She asked that we use a printed fabric as the background and a solid fabric for the star. It’s an improvisational block, so the instructions were pretty loose. Each quarter of the block has two rectangles that are placed at an angle to create halves of two different points.

My greatest challenge for this one was figuring out where to place the rectangles so all the background fabric pieces ended up right-reading. That did make my brain hurt a bit.

18 Half-Square Triangles

Finally, for this month, Jeanie asked us just to make 18 half-square triangles using a print fabric and a contrasting solid. She even provided instructions for a quick method to make them.

Cut 9-inch squares from each fabric. Draw horizontal and vertical lines at 3 inches and 6 inches.

Then draw horizontal lines in one direction through all the squares.

Layer the two fabrics right sides together. Then sew 1/4 inch from the diagonal lines, sewing on each side of the lines.

Cut on the horizontal and vertical lines (top row). Then cut on the diagonal lines and press open. Each square results in two half-square triangles.

And that results in 18 half-square triangles! Jeanie then asked us to trim these to 2.5 inches. For some reason, I have trouble with half-square triangles, and for most methods I have to cut my fabric larger to begin with in order to get the correct size finished pieces. But I was able to trim all of these to the right size with no problem!

You can catch up on my other Hive activity here, here, here, and here. There’s talk of starting a new Bee Hive Swap in January, and if that happens, I am in!