Catching up…..

Wow…cant believe that it has been 10 days since I have posted. Time to catch you all up with what has been going on here.

First of all, I finished the quilt top for the guild raffle quilt. The photo isn’t the best, but you can get the idea…..

At the last Charity Bee meeting, we auditioned a bunch of different inner borders and decided that the lighter Turquoise was the best. We have a darker one for the binding.

The next project was to get the rest of the blocks ready for the quilt that Mom and I are working on together. She is enjoying doing the hand applique, so I have been madly trying to get more ready to send to her.

On the Fourth of July, son Brian and D-I-L Amber spent the day with us so I enlisted Amber to help with picking fabrics…..

On Saturday, I finished fusing all of the other blocks and have now sent another set off to Mom.

The pattern that I was using had some funky birds included in the blocks and I wasn’t that excited about them so I decided instead to leave off the birds and just make the blocks different sizes……

Should be fun when it comes time to put the quilt together!!

Finally, I have a good friend who is having a BIG birthday and I decided that I want to make her a lap quilt…..by next Saturday!! So far, so good……

Raffle quilt update…..

Last week I spent much of my free time piecing on the Guild raffle quilt, finishing the center section on Tuesday……

I am pleased with the sparkle that all of the fabrics brings!! Now I needed to start thinking about adding some borders. Since I had SO many extra half-square triangles, I began planning to use those in the border.

I headed to my computer and starting playing with EQ, coming up with these three ideas……

I took these to the Charity Bee on Wednesday morning and a decision was made to use the first design.

We then started thinking about the inner border and what fabrics to use. We tried lots of different colors and never did really come to a consensus….

We finally decided that I would go ahead and piece the border this week and next Wednesday we would all bring fabrics that we think might work. There are a few Turquoise fabrics and we have even considered doing something like that.

I think that part of the problem is the narrowness of this border, but it pretty much has to be that way in order for the outside blocks to fit.

My thinking is that I am going to be cursing as I sew together 180 HST’s!!!

More to come…….

Next summer project…..

Every two years, our guild makes a quilt which is raffled to raise money for our charity projects and our educational projects. This year we have decided to make a scrap quilt and asked guild members to provide Four-Patches and Half-Square Triangle blocks to be used.

I…..in a moment of craziness…..offered to do the piecing for the top.

SO, I now have hundreds of patches, all ready to be put into a quilt…..

We always ask for the pieces to be made a bit too big so the first task is to trim each of the patches down to 4.5 inches.

That task done, I started thinking about different ways that we could set the blocks together and came up with three ideas.

The first was a quilt from one of Bonnie Hunter’s books. The idea here will be to use the blocks to create an unusual, possibly asymmetrical pattern…..

The second is a Jewel Box design…..

And I don’t know the name of this third one, but the idea came out of one of Bonnie Hunter’s books as well…….

Personally, I like this third version better, but will take all of these ideas to the Charity Bee tomorrow and let them make the final decision.

Then it will be on to the piecing.…..my favorite part!!!!