A Lil' Birdie Told Me

One of my New Year's Resolutions was to not buy any fabric, quilting patterns, or quilting books during 2011. I have made a commitment to only make quilts from the fabrics I have in my abundant stash.

So far...so good! :D

This is the beginning of a quilt I designed myself using a bird panel with coordinating fabrics. Let me tell you all about it ----

The quilt is made of two blocks - the pieced block and the birdie block. I wanted a block that would alternate with the bird blocks and frame them to add some pizzazz.

So I went to Quilter's Cache in search of a block that would meet my needs. (If you are not familiar with Quilter's Cache, it is a wonderful site that has blocks of various size. A gold mine for finding block and quilt patterns. Check it out!)

So with these five fabrics (the bird print will be used in the borders and for the backing), I created the alternating pieced blocks.

The name of the pattern is The Queen's X. I like the name of the block.

Next I 'framed' the bird prints with the wine colored fabric. This brought them up to the same size as the pieced blocks.

I love this panel fabric. These birds appear so gentle and serene as they sing to one another from atop their branches.

I then needed to rotate each pieced block to give the quilt its secondary design - with every other row's bird blocks being framed in either the peach or olive colored fabric.

Now just to get the rest of the rows sewn on there! I'm proud of myself for sticking to my New Year's Resolution. Only 8 more 'no-fabric-buying' months. I know I can do it!

Thanks for stopping by for a bit,

denise :D