The Terrifyingly Awesome Quilt - Bloggers Quilt Festival

One of my favorite things about being involved in the online sewing community is participating in Virtual Quilting Bees. What's a virtual quilting bee? It's the modern day Quilting Bee - little packages of fabric are mailed out to each of your fellow bee members and then weeks later finished blocks zip their way back to you so you can assemble your quilt top. When you're done you've got a quilt that's completed with blocks made by your friends from all over the world - and the results can be a pretty neat sometimes.

(Packages of fabric ready to head out)

I've been in quite a few Virtual Quilting Bees and have to say this one has been one of my favorites. The girls (and one guy!) of Bee Tweet are a GREAT group of people and I'm so excited to have this finished quilt that they all had a hand in helping me make. (Photo heavy post!)

(The first blocks mailed back to me)

When I was figuring out what I wanted to do for my month, I decided to go all out and just go crazy with a scrappy quilt. I found and fell in love with this block tutorial by my friend Aneela and told my Bee Tweeters to generally follow her guidelines but really just do what they wanted - I knew the blocks would all be so colorful and crazy that they'd all work together in the end.

(Up to 9 blocks now)

Once the blocks started coming in and I was laying them all next to each other I thought to myself that this was kind of both scary and awesome all at once. So the Terrifyingly Awesome quilt was born.

(The beginning of a quilt top)

I debated on sashing the blocks together but I decided against it. For one, these blocks are HUGE - 17.5 inches and sashing would have made the quilt top ginormous. Plus by then I had just totally embraced the terrifying awesomeness and was just running with it 100%.

(The quilt top all done)

I really had wanted to have this quilt done by Sewing Summit - because we had figured out that 8 out of the 11 members of Bee Tweet were going to be in attendance! Very rarely do you get to meet the people that actually made your blocks for you, but that's the great thing about Sewing Summit. :]

(L-R Jen, Leigh, Chris, Darci, Amy, Rachel, me, Ali)

But unfortunately I got too busy and the quilt was only about 1/2 quilted at the Summit. That didn't stop us from having a Bee Tweet photo op and getting a little silly. We even gave my quilt some love and did a classic summer camp photo pose on it as well.

(Summer camp)

Once I got home from Sewing Summit I was determined to get this quilt finished! It only took a few hours of dedicated quilting time on my new BabyLock Grace to do the straight line quilting.

(Determined to finish!)

I love the look and how easy machine sewn binding is!

(Binding going on!)

And finally - in and out of the washer and it was DONE!

(Piggies)

I can't thank my fellow Bee Tweet members enough for making me these crazy awesome huge colorful blocks. They each put in some of their own favorite scraps in addition to the fabric I sent them and it's so much fun to look over the blocks and search out all the different prints.

All the members of Bee Tweet:

Ali
John
Leigh
Rachel
Chris
Amisha
Rebecca
Darci
Jen
Amy

And if you've made it this far - I'm sure you want to see some pictures of the FINISHED quilt! ;]

(This is when I dropped it into the creek)

The back of the quilt I kept pretty simple, with a huge improvised block of all my favorite green and aqua prints, on a huge sea of Kona Grass.

On the whole quilt I did horizontal quilting, and then in just one column I did vertical quilting too, creating this grid on some of the blocks.

And the aqua binding. I knew with how crazy the front of the quilt was I wanted a solid binding, and this aqua was in almost every block so it tied everything together great.

I LOVE LOVE LOVE this quilt!

Linking up to Amy's Bloggers Quilt Festival - you should too!