flowers with quilty fun

I picked some flowers this week with the the Bee In My Bonnet Quilty Fun sew along!

It's week 18 already! I cheated and started to work on these blocks a few days early. I definitely knew that I wanted pink and blue flowers. It took a few days of fabric auditions before I settled on these two combinations. These fabrics are lucky that they just need to sit on my cutting mat and look pretty for their audition. Can you imagine if they had to sing and dance?!

We have just two steps left. First, next week is a bumblebee that will be framed by four patches, flying geese and quarter square triangles. And then the following week is finishing and a label. I have already started to work on the bumblebee.

Want a sneak peek? I was so exited to start this block. All along I've known that I wanted to customize my bumblebee. Instead of one 12" bee block, I would like to have a collection of 6" bees! Here's why. Every summer I love to visit the Cranford Rose Garden at the Brooklyn Botanic Garden. I follow the garden on Twitter, and when the roses are in bloom I make a BEEline over to the garden (hee hee). The roses are always beautiful, and they're always BUZZing with activity. The colors and scents are very inspirational. And that's how my idea was born. Here's the start of the bee bodies with their bright Pam Kitty Morning fabric that you can find here or here. 

The bees still need wings and heads. I've been cutting fabric as needed for for each step instead cutting it all at once. This extra-large calculator helps to ensure that each piece is downsized correctly. See those rectangles? They may become wings.

In one of those strange moments of synchronicity, last night I watched a B movie from 1940 called "Dr Cyclops." I'm a big fan of vintage horror and sci-fi movies. In this movie, Dr Cyclops uses his ray gun to miniaturize a horse, and then he turns it on a group of scientists and miniaturizes them, too. The tiny people are terrorized by the house cat. It's completely dumb fun. But I wonder if I am similar to Dr. Cyclops as I miniaturize my bees!

Thanks for stopping by to see my flower garden. Now buzz on over to the Quilty Fun Flickr group to check out what everybody else is cultivating this week. And also visit Patchwork Times to see what other quilters have on their design walls. And finally, I'm linking to Hexie Weekend (thanks, Angie!) with my not-quite-hexagons.