Lets talk about the bumble bee quilt.
Let’s talk about the Bumble Bee Quilt Pattern. This pattern is the very first pattern that I wrote.
A few years ago my friend Wendy, who is also a boater, asked me to make her grandchild a cushion with a bee on it, and I said, yep, no problem I can do that. So, I started sketching out a design in my trusty graph book, and ended up with a 22 x 22 square bumble bee pattern. This was all made with squares and half square triangles. I made the cushion cover with 1.5” unfinished squares, so the finished cushion was 22” x 22”. Now, I hadn’t made anything that small before, and it was really a case of I didn’t know what I didn’t know - I think if I had realised now tricky it was going to be for me to trim up those small half square triangles then I might not have been so eager to make it. There was definitely a lot of unpicking and looking back, it wasn’t that neat.
The bumble bee quilted cushion
Fast forward a few years to 2020 I made up a larger version as a quilt. I posted it on Instagram and Facebook, and there was lots of interest, with people asking me where I got the pattern from. I ended up selling the first one, then I made another and sold that, and people were now saying that I should make it into a quilt pattern.
I spoke to my niece, a graphic designer, and said can we make this into a pattern? Will you help me? I wrote her a brief on how I wanted it to look and read, and we set to creating the pattern and a brand for Rope and Anchor Trading Co.
By Feb 2021 after lots of hard work, we were finally happy and I launched my very first quilt pattern.
If you want to know more then click on the video above and have a listen to me talk about the bumble bee quilt.
One of the main things for me was that the pattern needed to be great for the visual learner, I didn’t want lots of words for people to have to follow. I wanted easy cutting and sewing instructions, with little tick boxes, so people can tick off where they have gotten up to. There is a lovely diagram in there on how to make up a half square triangle, and in the booklet version you can colour in your own bumble bee and see how it will look in a different colourway.
One of the first bumble bee quilts.
This pattern is also great for using up your scrap fabrics, and creating a scrappy quilt. In the one I made above you can see that I used lots of green scraps and yellow scraps of fabric. It really does make a dent in your fabric stash.
I am so pleased that I wrote this pattern, it has gotten me started in this wonderful world of quilting, and it amazes me everyday that people love my patterns and they stitch out my designs.
Thank you for your support.
