Compass Quilters

I'm so excited to be starting my first quilting bee. We've decided to call ourselves Compass Quilters since we are women from all around the country who met through the Plum and June blog hop. The countries we represent are Australia, New Zealand, Austria, Italy, and the USA. This month, Rebecca from One Wee Bird is our queen bee and boy is she throwing down the gauntlet for creative blocks! She's chosen this amazing hummingbird block:

I'm very excited to try it, even if I'm a tad bit nervous. It's a paper pieced pattern and I'm not very good at those yet. I've only attempted paper piecing twice before. Warning - not my best work here, folks!

The first was this circle of geese and was through Craftsy's 2013 BOM class. That went well enough since I could keep watching the video over and over while piecing it. I then bit off more than I could chew and tried the patchwork cat. I tried using small scraps which was my first problem. I didn't have a stash to speak of at the time so I was trying to conserve my precious fabric. Can't tell you how many times I made mistakes and my fabric was flipped the wrong way and too small. This sad little block didn't even come close to squaring up. I just wasn't ready for one this difficult, and it's made me avoid the technique until now.

But I'm up for the challenge and can't wait to get started! I've started rifling through my fabric stash and have found a few low volume fabrics that will work well.

I think I'll save the print fabric though, in case one of my Aussie bee members requests low volume fabrics. I've also pulled some bright colored fabrics for the kites, but I'm keeping those under wraps for now. Wish me luck!