I feel so lucky lately. I won at the Fair and yesterday I won a prize at the guild meeting.
July BAM Raffle Prize
Every month there is a very generous raffle prize given out. I haven’t ever won, that I can remember. I never expected to win.
I am pretty pleased with the items, especially the book, because it has some patterns I have gotten out of magazines. Now they are all in one book. It’s great! The colors aren’t really mine, but they aren’t horrible either. And I like the little pouches and portfolios.
July BAM Raffle Prize – open
Lynette is the genius who puts together the prizes. She is retiring at the end of the year and I have agreed to head up a committee to create the raffle prizes. I have some ideas. With a team I think I can do it.
I am writing these posts out of order, but I just realized I didn’t post about the most recent BAM meeting, which was before the most recent Sew Day. Lots happened, but some of the happenings stood out to me.
Sue S’s Show & Tell – June BAM Meeting
At show and tell, Sue S (we now have 3-4 Sues!!!) showed a quilt I really liked. It wasn’t difficult, but it was wonderful and used lots of fabrics. The design would also be a great leaders and enders project.
This could be made using the 16 patches the Community Quilts team collects. It could also be started using 4 patches.
I also REALLY like the border. It is very effective. I think Sue S (she made the Casserole Carrier) is working through her UFOs and this was one she worked on while her mom was sick. It is a great example of a good way to relieve stress without eating or watching TV.
BAM Word Quilt Swap – June 2019
The results of the Word swap was also amazing. The variety of techniques was awe inspiring. I thought about participating in the swap for about 5 minutes, then didn’t think about it anymore. People really went out of their way to find great techniques beyond applique or paper piecing. Definitely click on the photo to see it larger. In one of the pieces, the negative space was quilted and the letters left unquilted. Genius!
I really like what he did and am planning another one in purples as soon as I finish a couple of the regular postage stamp donation blocks I have started.
Green Strips Donation Quilt detail
Green Strips Donation Quilt detail
Tim was nice enough to send me some details of the quilting, which looks great! He was excited about quilting this piece because I didn’t use white. I’ll think about grey or yellow when I make the purple one.
Green Strips Donation Quilt -scrappy binding detail
He changed the back, because he didn’t like it, to an ombre fabric (see that blue at the bottom?). It’s fine with me as long as he doesn’t give me the back back. I already counted it in my fabric used tally and it is hard enough to get those yards used as it is. He is also thinking of a scrappy binding. Photo is of his thoughts on binding.
A couple of things came up at the guild meeting which I wanted to share.
Libs Elliot donation top
First, Another of the tops I made and donated was finished and shown. Cheryl finished the Stripes donation top that I made at QuiltCon last year. She gave me some nice compliments on it, which made me feel better about it. I may try that stripes technique without actually making the stripes. I know I can’t vary the stripes when I do’t make them myself, but making the stripes is super tedious.
Peggy’s HST donation quilt
Peggy, as usual, was prolific in her quiltmaking. She made the above donation quilt from scraps she had saved generated by a previous pattern. Each of the non-white triangles consist of made fabric. I think the randomness of the layout could be done with HSTs and would make a fun donation quilt. Once I am done with the Bias Rectangles, perhaps I will play around with this concept.
Color My Quilt for Sam
Finally, we have a guild baby. His name is Sam and he is about a month old now. His mom, Velvet Pincushion, brought him and his grandma with her to the guild. The new little family will be moving soon, so we were thrilled to get a chance to meet him. I am excited to see that VP is still stitching even with a new baby.
She brought the Color My Quilt quilt she worked on before Sam was born. Progress has halted, but she made good progress before Sam was born. I don’t know if we’ll see the quilt before they move. It is more block based than some of the others. My shard is on the bottom left in between the Friendship Star and the very bottom left hand star.
As you know, members of my guild make bags and then the rest of the members bring small gifts/goodies with which to fill them. This time we had a new position for which to make a bag. The Member-At-Large position was somewhat undefined, so there was some discussion about whether the job that had been done was bag worthy. I felt bad not giving a bag to a board member when, despite her work, everyone else on the board was getting a bag.
Allison’s 2018 Bag
As a result, I pulled fabrics and made a Jane Market Tote. The hardest part of these bags is the cutting. I always forget how many pieces I need to cut. I take responsibility, because I have such trouble understanding patterns. I’d love a system where cutting was uniformly described across all patterns. If wishes were horses…. Still, once cut, this bag goes together easily.
I add interfacing to the outside pieces, which makes the bag pretty crisp, though still foldable. I also set the straps in the top seam rather than sewing them to the outside. This means that three seams cover the straps and provide security.
I did my piece at almost the last minute, but not quite.
Nicole asked for a dark, kind of Moon and Stars theme. I used scraps and this was what i came up with. I didn’t have the dark batiks in the example. Others might and mine will provide a bit of night-shiny brightness to the quilt. I hope…
Mary put out her Color My Quilt directions at the last meeting and I was able to get it done while I was working on Who Am I? a couple of weekends ago.
I am still going with long thin pieces as I think they help people put the quilts together, though most don’t know it yet since only two finished pieces have been sewn.
I totally forgot to post the finished version of my merit hexie pillow. The last time I posted about this was on April 4!
I don’t know exactly when I finished it, but it was not long after April 4.
I had to take all the papers out before appli-quilting them on to the background.
I also forgot to show it at the guild meeting. I’ll bring it with the Walking Foot WOW pillow (another thing I forgot to bring to show and tell) to the next meeting.
Ruth gave out her sheet of instructions for her Color My Quilt at the last meeting and I got right down to business. I was going for sparks of color on a dark-ish background.
I may not be quite done with the piece. I wanted all the color contained so I am contemplating that plum/burgundy strip. I have a few weeks to decide.
Again, all of these were from my scrap pile or bins.
As I have probably mentioned 300 times, I was super behind on the Color My Quilt project. I worked through the 5 I had to do methodically. I didn’t do anything crazy and was able to make some progress.
Leann’s Color My Quilt Shard – June 2018
Leeann had a landscape theme and I just copied the colors into a big chunk.
I am not sure if this is what she wanted, but it will work in some capacity. She can cut it up to fill in spaces, though I wonder if people actually feel ok about cutting up the shards?
I should have mentioned earlier in the week a reminder about the parameters of Color My Quilt. This project started last year with Karen’s idea. It is a guild challenge where one person per month volunteers to receive shards. The selected person provides a sheet with an idea, colors, poetry, a quote – basically some kind of inspiration to willing participants. The participants make a shard. It can be a block or a chunk of scraps in the right colors or almost anything. I think it is interesting to see what the chunks look like together. So far only one quilt has been made. I am curious to see if others get made.
I wasn’t sure what to do with Helen’s prompt. I thought about it and considered different options for a long time. Finally, I gave up and decided not to do it.
I think that was what I needed to do, because, shortly thereafter, I thought about ROYGBIV. I decided that making a long strip in color order would be the thing to do. It would fulfill Helen’s wish and it would be consistent with my effort to provide a different shape for people to work with.
I just pulled pieces out of my scrap bin and that seemed to work well.
Alison is really great. She always brings something to work on after the meeting. I have brought things in the past and I seriously thought about bringing the BAMaQG IRR quilt to stitch on. I think I need to try my hand at Big Stitch again at home before I start Big Stitching in public.
This time she brought scraps. She brought them to sort out. I didn’t get to ask her how she normally stores them. What I saw was a big bag in which they were shoved.
Alison’s String Blocks
Alison was sorting scraps to make these 12/5 x 4.5 rectangles to make a quilt from a book called No Scrap Left Behind. She started out using a foundation (tracing paper), but found after a few blocks that she didn’t need it. This is definitely a block you make with what you have and then trim to the right size.
I like how the sizes of the strips are different. Alison said that she doesn’t use any strips larger than 2.5″ wide and I think that makes sense. I like the skinny little strips as well. They add a bit of pop to the block. I am kind of excited to try this, not that I am done making the Bias Rectangles for more of the Spiky 16 patch quilts.
This block sparked my interest. I have a ton of scraps. I do use them, but the piles are not getting any smaller. This block would enable me to use different scraps together. Once finished, I could put the blocks together in different ways to make interesting and fun donation quilts.
I really like it that he is bold enough to use dark thread. His motifs are large-ish and very loose, which makes the quilts nice and drapey.
Ends n.2 donation quilt detail
He also is doing a nice job with the pebbling.
Ends n.2 donation quilt back
The back looks a lot better quilted!
I am so pleased to be able to collaborate with Tim. He seems pleased about it as well. I do hope he will tell me if he doesn’t want to quilt some of my donation quilts.
I needed to rest at the beginning of March, but knew I had a pillow swap to finish by the April meeting. My recipient’s color preferences were listed as:
Green (lime, pickle)
magenta
orange
white
I wanted to be sure my design was modern, fit the desires of the recipient and wasn’t too difficult to piece. I immediately thought of the Alison Glass fabrics I used for the Triple Star. Except for the white, I thought those fabrics would fit well with the desired color scheme.
I had a pillow I thought was made by my pal Amanda stuck in my mind. I asked her about it and she suggested Pinterest. I immediately found the design for which I was looking – the X Plus O block. Once I had the name, I found a lot of examples and spent a happy hour laying on the couch and looking at them.I also found an example that I thought would be good inspiration.
Before I could really sew again, I worked on the design using EQ8. I was able to play with the size and get the elements right.
Maria’s BAM Pillow Swap in process
After I could sew again, I went back to working on my Sew Together Bag project. In the middle of that project, I needed a break, but didn’t want to reset my machine for piecing. I knew that if I did, I would have three more UFOs and another year would pass before I could give the gifts. Cutting was a good idea, so I cut out all of the pieces.
One of the helpful parts of EQ8 is the ability to print out rotary cutting directions. I found a bug in the process of doing this, which I reported to the Electric Quilt Company. It turned out not to be a bug; they don’t consider a lozenge shape to rotary cuttable. I was able to figure out the size to cut a square as I plan to use the flippy corners method or the Simple Folded Corners Ruler.
I also used the Spoonflower zipper installation instructions. I acually watched the video and found it to be really helpful. I am pleased with how my pillow’s zipper closure came out, though I had to redo it a couple of times. I think the problem was the zipper foot I used. I used the flat snap on zipper foot. I didn’t feel like I could get as close to the zipper as I like. As a result I didn’t catch the seam allowance, which makes a closed up area around the zipper. I should have used the tall, skinny foot. I am used to it. I didn’t use it because I was sick of installing feet and resetting settings on my machine. I paid the price.
BAM Pillow Swap Recipients
We exchanged yesterday and everyone did a wonderful job. I am behind Christina, but you can see my pillow over my head.
Rhonda led us in an exercise using unconventional materials, e.g. not fabric. For me, these materials were unconventional in terms of quiltmaking, but familiar in terms of creativity. I love working with paper and don’t get to do it enough.
Rhonda brought quite a bit of stuff for us to work with, but not enough that we spent the whole time rummaging for materials. I saw a shiny binder clip as she was introducing us to the materials and an idea started to form in my head.
Julie’s Unconventional Materials Exercise
Maureen’s Unconventional Materials WIP
Nancy’s Unconventional Materials Exercise
Everyone’s pieces came out so differently. It was exciting to see the creativity at work. I didn’t take photos of all of the pieces. I was too engrossed in my own work, but each of them were different and exciting in their own way.
CQFA Unconventional Materials Exercise
I am pleased with the way my piece came out. I am also pleased that I was able to finish. Ever since I saw Nancy’s map piece for the last show and talked with Maureen about her work with maps in her collage group, I have been wanting to work with maps. I am going to check to see if there is a category at the fair that will be suitable for this piece.
