Cherry Blossoms in D.C. - Building Blocks Tuesday

Finally!  Here is my new block for the Star of Africa Bee.  The queen bee for the month of July wanted a scrapbook style block in pink.  Now, I like pink, but I had no idea what a scrapbook style block was.  She said to make a block of anything in my country that I would like to take a picture of.  Well, that made it somewhat more difficult because, I couldn't think of anything pink that was photo-worthy and represented my country.  I had exactly 3 ideas:  Barbie (all the rage in my house right now,  but not necessarily an interesting block), Elvis in a pink Cadillac (representing our country's rock n' roll heritage), and pink cherry blossoms (the most doable idea).

I actually started on the pink Cadillac.  I sketched out a car and tried to figure out how to paper piece it.  It wasn't looking like I wanted, so I scrapped it.  It was a little too much work for the amount of time I had.  I think it could be done, but I wasn't willing to give it all I had right now.  So I started thinking about the cherry blossoms.

My best friends family has a place in Northern Michigan that we visited this summer.  We fly into Traverse City when we go, and they have a huge "Cherry Festival" in the summer to celebrate the areas cherry crops.  I haven't been there during cherry blossom time, so I went online to do a little research.  Funny, the Cherry Festival website only showed people eating various cherry products, no actual cherry pictures or cherry blossom pictures.  I guess they have their priorities.

In the end, this block was inspired by a postage stamp commemorating the Centennial of the Cherry Blossom Festival in Washington, D.C. and it certainly was very picturesque!  I have actually never been to D.C., but I immediately adopted the idea of creating my block based on the picture in the stamp and this is what resulted.  I really like how it turned out, and I hope the queen bee does too.

I also caught up on a few QAL blocks:

                                  
Don't forget to link up your marvelous blocks that you have been working on!  You have all week to add them if you like!

Don't forget:

1) Please link up only to the page in your blog showing your wonderful project, not just the blog homepage
2) Make sure to put your blog name as the description so people know where they are going or the name of your block!
3) Please consider grabbing my button and posting it in your blog post
4) Visit other linky participants!

Until next week,

Jen