Charity Quilts

The charity group of our guild has agreed to make quilts for the local Senior Center. They have a brand new, gorgeous building, but the dining room has vaulted ceilings and is almost entirely white…..can you say boring and echo-ey!!!

We are planning to make six or seven quilts, each measuring 60-65 inches square. We had been putting back tops that might work and I had been given the chore of figuring out how to make them all fit together. After staring at them for DAYS, I decided that it was an impossible task and so I started over.

I first looked for border fabrics, trying to pick floral prints that might go together. I then added fabrics for the inner borders and built the quilts around the borders.

These were the original sets of border fabrics, however I had to make a few changes as it went on because there wasn’t enough of a couple of the fabrics……

I moved to the computer and used EQ5 to design traditional blocks for the quilts. I pieced the first one myself to see who they were going to look……

I am not super fond of the inner border and may change it, but everyone said that we should just leave it for now and see how it looks when all of the quilts are finished.

After making the first top, I put together 5 kits and various guild members are going to take the kit and finish a top. I warned them all to try the inner border before sewing it on just in case I have made another boo-boo. I found that it was really hard to select that particular border without actually seeing the quilt top first.

Here is the result of my efforts……

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I cant wait to see the finished tops!!!!!

More Charity Quilts

On Wednesday I attended the guild charity bee again and we enjoyed seeing two quilts that are finished and ready to be handed off to their respective charity organizations…..

Here is the one that was shown last week, but now it has been quilted and bound…..

The next quilt is one that we started last autumn but has just now been quilted. Once again we asked the guild members to provide pieces and the charity bee put the top together. We ended up making lots of changes to the pattern to make it look better, with the corners being a royal pain. After each round, I would take the top back to the group and we would decide what to do next. In the long run it turned out to be a bright and fun quilt.

The group was squaring up the quilt at the meeting and then Nancy (our binding saint) will finish off with the binding.

Charity Work

Yesterday, I delivered a quilt to my Charity Bee that will be donated to the local Relay for Life event. They will raffle it off to raise money for the American Cancer Society.

Our guild (Cotton Patch Quilters) has made about 10 of these quilts over the last 5 years and they have raised a fairly large amount of money each year. The guild members are given instructions as to color and size of the blocks (mostly 4 patches and 1/2 square triangle blocks). When we receive them, the charity group trims them down to the actual size needed and one of us takes all of the blocks home and pieces the top. That was my job this time!!!

The proportions on this quilt ended up a bit whacky so we used some of the leftover 1/2 square triangles and pieced a border for the sides of the quilt.

One of our members (Ellen) will quilt it on her long arm machine and another member (Nancy) will put the binding on.

We are pleased with the final product and are already planning the next one to be made!!!!

The joys of quilting with a group!!!

Even though I have been very remiss about writing on the blog, I have been fairly busy in the last week with quilting.

I am continuing to work on the Portugal Stairs quilt that I started 2 weeks ago. I had gotten stuck on it and knew that it needed “something”, but I couldn’t figure out what. So, yesterday I took it to my Bee and, of course, they immediately saw the problem and gave me tons of suggestions. I went into the group being frustrated with it and not wanting to work on it, and now I cant wait to get back to it.

I have also been working on a Charity quilt that will be given to a local Relay for Life event. The basic blocks were made by our guild members, and I started working at putting it together. Once again, I knew that it wasn’t exactly right and, once again, the bee was there to rescue me. As we worked on the design wall, someone said….”what if we put it on point”, and that was the answer. It completely changed the look of the blocks and I am excited about working on it some more.

Last Saturday, my friend Deb asked me if I could help her out of a time jam by quilting a small wallhanging that she was trying to get made for a class sample. This is the first time that I have ever quilted a piece for another quilter, and I found that I was really nervous to start it, but once I got going it was a lot of fun to do. The nicest comment that she made was that I must have been reading her mind because it was quilted in the exact way that she had thought about.

Finally, I worked on one more quilt……it is being donated to a local cancer center and they will raffle it for funding. The fabrics came from a woman’s stash that was left to the center and these particular ones were a kit that she had bought but never started. I began by cutting the strips that were required by the kit, but the charity group then decided that we weren’t really happy with how they would look, so I went home, got onto Electric Quilt, and came up with another design that would use the strips that we had already cut.

After I had pieced a bunch of the blocks, I realized that it was “too much of the same thing” and decided to insert a red sashing strip and then add more blocks to the outside of the sash. At this point I took it back to the charity group and Nancy suggested that we add a “piano key” border. She took care of that, Ellen quilted it and we presented it to the Center board the next week. Here is the finished product……

Bits and Pieces

I finished the last two BQL challenges yesterday, including binding. Here they are…..

I especially enjoyed doing the embellishing on the purses.

I had commissioned my friend Anita’s husband (Bill) to make a rust piece for me that looked like sunflowers. Last night she presented me with this wonderful piece…..

I cant decide which side I want to use…..what do you think?

I think that I am going to print out a bunch of copies of this photo and practice designing the quilting.

I am leaving for Texas in the morning to spend a few days with my Mom. The main project that I want to do is to document all of her quilts……she has done some wonderful ones.

I will try to post if I can. I am actually excited about trying to do an email post, but am not sure that I know how. If you see some strange entries, you will know that I am trying to figure out the process.

Until later…….