Calendar Quilt – June

Ta-dah! Here is the June block, I’m just sneaking this post into the final few days of June. I have set myself the deadline of completing each of the month’s blocks before the end of that month but June has been hectic! Mostly the hectic-icity has come from kids stuff but I have been busy at my sewing machine too. I can’t show you the results just yet though.

So for June, I had planned to do a very traditional bowl of strawberries topped with a swirl of cream and a silver spoon. I drafted out my design but wasn’t entirely happy with it. The strawberries looked a bit blobby. I showed it to Himself for his opinion. ‘Oh, it’s lovely!,’ he enthused, ‘I really like the apples.’ It was time to think of strawberry design part two. Next to our pond, we have little pots of strawberries so I took my inspiration from these.

I had some teeny tiny little yellow buttons that I intended to use for the flower centres. They looked cute but I liked the buttons on the flower pot too and altogether it just looked a bit button-y. You can see what you think.

When I removed the buttons from the flower pot, it looked too bare and when I took the buttons off the strawberry flowers, they looked unfinished. In the end, I faced my hand embroidery demons and just stitched rough circles in the centres of the flowers with pale yellow embroidery floss.

We have been amused throughout June by the antics of our neighbours kitten. It hides among our fox-gloves and launches playful attacks on the bumble bees. The neighbour’s kitten has yet to learn caution around buzzy, stripy things and the kids have been watching the show in appalled fascination. We never saw it get stung but something happened. For the past few days the cat has reverted to sulkily stalking the pigeons, keeping a wary eye on the bees!

To finish the block, the Littlest One requested a butterfly. I like the dimensional touch it adds to the block. I used to make so many of these butterflies when I sold personalised cushions. One customer asked for a butterfly to represent each grandchild on a cushion for their grandmother. It was a very fluttery cushion!

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