Every year Kate Chiconi makes a quilt to be auctioned for an Ovarian Cancer charity. Several quilters around the world help make blocks for the quilt. The ‘colour’ for ovarian cancer is teal so that’s always the colour scheme and the theme of the quilt is always a play on words with teal. This year the title is ‘Tealing All Our Stories’ , it’s a bookshelf quilt so we were to make a 12.5″ block of books and a few personal touches could be included too, like you would have on a book shelf. Kate wants to start making the quilt very soon so I knew these blocks were my priority as soon as I finished the walk.

I volunteered to make two blocks. For the first one I used some gorgeous teal batiks, one with gold patterns on which I’ve treasured for years in my scrap box, waiting for the perfect time to use it. I’ve not made a bookshelf block before and the maths did throw me a bit at first, I sort of chose the fabrics, then made books before arranging them so they looked balanced. I toyed with the idea of adding a Yorkshire rose to one of the spines but I decided it would dominate too much, so I’ve kept this block fairly simple.

For the second block I decided to make it a bit more personal. We were allowed to use other colours so long as they don’t compete with the teal. I made this is sections, thinking on my feet as I went along. My starting point was a little picture of Catbells, my special place in the Lakes. I cut out the shape and stitched it onto the sky on the machine with ‘blanket stitch’. I then added the lake in front. I used a grey pattern to frame it.

I decided to stand the picture on lying down books. I chose a couple of bee fabrics, partly because I’ve just made a book on bees, but also as a nod to my mum, we used to keep bees and she thought (wrongly I think!) that our family name of Bickerdike originated with beekeepers. One of them does have a touch of teal in the pattern and the other is a blue which goes well with teal. The bottom book is probably more green than teal, it’s a bird themed one for my love of birds. With hindsight these books should have been the other way round as I feel they’re now lying face down!

I was planning to have a slanted book standing, but if I was to keep the lovely allium head on the spine, I didn’t have room to make it lean.

Hopefully these two blocks will work for the quilt design so they are now winging their way to Australia. Have a look at Kate’s blog to see the other blocks that have been made and in time to see the beautiful quilt.