Nesting Robin

What a fun year I've had working on my Nesting Robin.  Do you wonder what a nesting robin is?  It's like a round robin or a row robin but it nests at our own home.  In other words, it's not passed around to other friends to work on; we work on it ourselves.  We're doing the nesting robin as a group in our guild chapter -18 of us are participating.  As usual we each pick out our own color palate, a theme, decide if we want to do a row or a round robin, and what size the blocks will be.  What makes it unique is that each month we randomly draw out of a hat to see which block we’ll all use for the month.  There are 8 categories in the hat and we decided we'd do 5 rows or rounds - what blocks we make is the luck of the draw. 

The first month the drawing was for "Classic or Traditional" blocks.  I decided on a theme of "Quilt My Own Story".  Along with my blocks I'm writing the story of the various places I've lived and some memories associated with those places.  This first row represents where I was born and raised  - in cold country - Wisconsin & Minnesota.  The main block is an 8 1/2" needleturn applique block called "Winter Still Life" - a pattern by Blackbird Designs that I found in one of my quilting magazines.  The blocks on either side of it are 4 1/2" paper-pieced blocks and are called SeeSaw - which was my favorite past-time when I was small.  Here is the first row I made:

The second month we drew "Stars".  I decided to do a swag with a couple of stars and a double star on it that I could use along the top of my quilt.  The stars represent the many friends I made along the way.  Since we moved every couple of years while I was growing up, it was always a case of making new friends and leaving old friends.  The story I'm writing to go along with this row is about some of the friends who enriched my life along the way - the "stars" in my life.  Here is my second row:

The third month we drew "buildings".  My row is a paper-pieced cabin block with some log cabin blocks around it.  Since my theme is about the places I've lived I may want to emphasize this block a little more and this row may undergo some changes when I work on putting the rows together.  Here it is so far:

The fourth month we drew "things".  I decided to make quilting related tools and quilting things since I spend so much of my time quilting.  There's a rotary cutter, a thimble, a button jar, a spool of thread, and a tape measure/ruler - just in case you can't tell from the picture.  My story for this row is about the time I've lived in Arizona and fell in love with quilting.

It's the fifth month and we drew our last category - it was "flora or fauna/plants or animals".  I decided to applique flowers that are either the state flower or flowers that represent/remind me of the various states where I've lived.  Since I've lived in more than 5 states, some states needed to be grouped together.  Somehow it all worked out and I was able to finish it last night.  Yea!  Here is my last row:

Now we'll take about 2 months to put our quilts together, maybe add filler rows, sashing, or whatever.  Then we'll quilt them and have a reveal tea to show them to each other.  We've shown our rows at our guild meetings as we went along, but combining them and putting them into a quilt will be a secret until the reveal tea.  After the reveal we'll take them to our guild meeting and show them to the whole group.

I can't wait to see everyone's quilts.  Here are a few pictures of some of the rows that others have done: