Hive 6 January Block for Sylvia from Karen

1. Name: Karen

2. Where you live: Santa Rosa, California, USA

3. Tell us about your family: I share my life with one sweet husband, an adorable cat, and a hungry tortoise.

4. Tell us about your pets: Are they not family? My kitty is a Siamese and therefore very loud. My tortoise is, well, a tortoise, so he doesn't make any noise.

5. How long have you been quilting? I started in 2013, so we're going on three years now. Wow! I've been sewing much longer than that, but I took my first quilting class in March 2013 and bought a new machine so I could free motion quilt a few months later. 

6. What crafts do you do other than quilting? I've done many crafts in the past. Sewing, knitting, photography, and ceramics have been my favorites. I'm trying to focus on quilting right now, but I see myself weaving in the future. 

7. Fabric line you want to buy next: This is the year of the stash for me (and many others, I see) so I'm trying to limit buying fabric. That said, I'll probably end up with at least part of Carkai by Carolyn Friedlander pretty soon.

8. Preferred quilting method (FMQ, long arm, hand, etc.): It's all about the FMQ for me. I would love to use a long arm some day, but I don't know anyone with one I can play around with. I think I'll be trying out a sit-down mid arm in a class at Quiltcon in February. Who's going to Quiltcon, by the way? This will be my first time. 

9. Where we can find you on social media: I'm still kind of in the stone age when it comes to social media. I am on flickr but I actually am not sure how to tell you how to find me. I'll update if I grow some internet savvy. 

10. Favorite book: It's so hard to choose one! I have a hard time choosing favorites in any category, so let's go with a random good book instead: Barbara Kingsolver's Prodigal Summer. 

11. Favorite show to binge watch: Again with the favorites! I really enjoyed Bones for a while. 

Now on to the Union Jack. This block was Scary. Yes, capital S Scary. I don't know why it intimidated me so much, since the tutorial is very detailed. Once I actually started the block, after a week of worrying, it wasn't so bad. I breezed through it, actually. 

However, when I started this blog post, I noticed my Quadrant 2 didn't look quite right. After almost convincing myself nobody would notice, I decided to redo Quadrant 2. It took a while, but I figured out that I had used the wrong side as the "anchor." 

For those of you who haven't started yet, pay attention to the anchor side! It is easy to accidentally use the wrong corner as the anchor and then you end up like me. Here is my first rendition of the block. See how one dark orange diagonal goes into the corner like that? Not good. 

After all is sewed and pressed, I actually feel quite fond of the block, and hope Sylvia and her husband enjoy it.