Sewing Bee versus Busy Bee
A Sewing Bee according to the Collins Dictionary is an old-fashioned British English term that means a small informal social gathering (usually of women) based around the activity of making or mending clothes or other things with a needle and thread. A Busy Bee in the same Collins Dictionary is a person who is industrious or has many things to do.
Community Quilts has for quite some time used the term Busy Bee for their monthly Sunday gatherings, Anyone who has attended one of those events can attest to that fact that on those days there are many activities being done, such as sorting donated fabric, finding matching fabric, identifying requirements to finish UFOs, making up binding, cutting wadding, attaching labels to completed quilts, selecting backing fabric, hand sewing binding and piecing quilt tops.
However, for something different on Wednesday the 3rd of July, starting at 1pm, Community Quilts held a Sewing Bee where the only activity available was sewing fabric by machine to make a quilt top. Of course there was some cutting of fabric, squaring of blocks and pressing of seams, as you really cannot just sew fabric together.
Fourteen enthusiastic ladies attended the Sewing Bee. They started by selecting a project pack containing unfinished work (donated to CQ) and matching fabric, in sufficient quantity to hopefully enable a quilt top to be produced. Some managed to achieve this outcome, whilst others made significant progress by increasing the number of finished blocks or the size of the quilt top in their chosen project pack.
Refreshments were provided to keep energy levels up throughout the afternoon and two varieties of soup were supplied (thanks to Roslyn) for those that continued on into the evening. It is amazing how much can be achieved when you just sit and sew. Thanks to all who attended, whether they progressed a project, completed a quilt top, and/or took their unfinished projects home to complete, your efforts were greatly appreciated. The Sewing Bee was such an enjoyable and successful event, that another one will be definitely be scheduled before the end of the year.