ECQG Raffle Quilt–Dear Hannah

Brenda Papadakis of Dear Jane fame graciously gave her permission for us to use her Dear Hannah quilt patterns for our 2011 Raffle Quilt.  We will hold the drawing for the quilt at our quilt show in 2011.  We bought the Electric Quilt DVD of the patterns, as well as the book.  I used the DVD to blow up the pattern from the original 4 1/2 inch to 6 inch blocks.  I printed a color copy of each block, along with a line drawing and set up a notebook to turn over to the raffle quilt chair.

Carol then selected the fabric to use in the quilt.  The background is Kona black and there is an assortment of bright colors for the piecing and applique.  There are 143 blocks and she passed them out a couple of months ago.  We received all but one back.  Thankfully Carol had made a couple of extra blocks and brought them to the sew-in yesterday.

Since there are so many blocks, we worked on the top eight rows of the quilt and got that much put together yesterday.  This first photo is of the blocks on the design wall in the order of the original quilt.  We moved them quite a bit to get the colors spread throughout the quilt.

We then added a bottom and left side sashing to each block except the first block in each row.  We cut the sashing at 2 inches instead of 1 1/2.  After pressing the blocks, we cut each to 7 1/2, including sashing.  This allowed us to accommodate the slightly different sized blocks you always get from a group project.

By the end of the day, here is the top of the quilt.

Don’t the blocks look much better with the sashing?

Tomorrow is another sew-in and hopefully we will finish the top enough to sew on borders.

Melinda

What you can do with 5-Inch Squares

I thought I would show a quilt from the last guild show and tell that uses squares and half square triangles.  It could easily be made from the squares I am giving away in the Fall into Fall giveaway.

 

I really love this quilt and would like to make one.  The large stack of squares would give you a good start on this or any other scrappy quilt.’

Melinda

Retreat Quilts at Guild

We had a wonderful guild meeting yesterday.  The program for the day was sharing of quilts made from the yearly retreats we have.  We go to Red Top Mountain in March of each year and a few people have gone to each retreat since the early 90’s.

Each year there is a featured quilt/project.  Here is one from the first retreat.

Here are some from the more recent retreats.

Here are quilts from the retreat earlier this year.

I don’t think you can see the beautiful quilting on both of the quilts.  The first one has flowers quilted in bright variegated thread and the second one has the most beautiful custom quilting on it.

My quilt from this year is still waiting for more appliqué.  It is folded up waiting patiently for me to get back to it.  Here is the last photo I found on the computer of it.

It does have some of the appliqué on it but it still needs more.

Lastly there is a wonderful junk food quilt.  While it was not an official retreat quilt it is the project she worked on all during the retreat – we were all fascinated by it up on the design wall and loved it when she showed it yesterday.

I have lots more from show and tell to share later.

Melinda

Wacky Devine Nine

We had community service today at guild. I taught from a pattern by my sister called "Wacky Devine Nine" which uses nine fat quarters. Each person brought their own nine fat quarters, that coordinate. They will need to add borders but the goal today was to get the center top done and five of them finished. There were several others that have the blocks completed and just need to do the final assembly. This first picture is of a blue and beige top. The colors are even prettier in person.

Next is a very bright quilt with cute kids prints. There is some green in some of the prints and I think she is going to put a narrow green border on it before a wider border of one of the prints.

These are dog and cat prints! It is really cute. She is talking about a black and white narrow border before adding a wider border.

Next is a quilt from green, beige and various reds. It is beautiful also.

The last completed top is from a Thimbleberries collection. She wants to use of some of her stash and is happy with how this turned out.

We do community service on the 5th Tuesday when there is one. That gives us 4 days a year that we get together to make quilts or other charity projects. Many of our members do more but we sew together on these days. Our goal this year is to make enough quilts that we can give them to the local police for them to use when they are in an emergency situation with children.

We plan to make cool-ties for the soldiers at our next community service day. We did it twice last year and made about 100 so we want to make even more this time.

We have changed the day to include lunch. Today, we had Subway sandwiches that the local Subway donated to us. Our leader asked for a discount and the manager said he would donate them to us. If you are near Acworth, GA be sure to get a sandwich at the Subway in the new Wal-Mart on Hwy. 41 - they are wonderful people there.