Hearfelt thanks for our guild president

It's a tradition in our quilt guild that the outgoing president is gifted a quilt made by the members of the guild, when she finishes her 2 years of leadership. The quilt is presented at our June Banquet, the last meeting of our year.

As vice president of the guild, it fell to me to coordinate the making of the quilt for Pat,  our 2018/2020  president.  I chose to make her a pattern of pieced hearts made from 1930's reproduction fabrics, a style of fabric I know she favors. Everything about the quilt is kept secret so we can surprise the recipient at the end of the year.

I used some of my stash, as well as contributions from our members to come up with about 75 different fabrics:

From these, I made up kits that included a square of the 30's fabric, a coordinating white background fabric, and the directions.

Over the course of the last few meetings of 2019, I handed out kits and took names of anyone who wanted to contribute a block.  By February of this year, I had 60 blocks returned to me, each one signed by the maker, and many with lovely words of thanks.

I only had to make 3 extras to get a nice layout of 9 X 7 blocks.

I chose an offset setting and white sashing and managed to get the top all sewn together by our March meeting.

At that meeting, I handed off the quilt top to one of our members who had volunteered to do the longarm quilting.  Thank goodness I had the quilt top finished by then, because the March meeting turned out to be the last one we had for the year. The very next day everything closed down  due to Covid.  (We've converted to having meetings via ZOOM starting this September.)

Karen  contacted me when she had the top quilted, and volunteered to add the binding. She sent me this photo of the finished quilt:

Karen delivered the quilt to Pat with instructions not to open it until the next ZOOM meeting of our guild.  We finally got to see her open it during our October meeting, and it was fun to watch, even though it would have been so much more fun to be able to give it to her in person.

You do what you have to do to keep everybody safe, of course.  Like everybody else, I can't wait to get to the other side of this pandemic.  

Making do with what you have on hand

As much as I love the Civil War reproduction fabrics, I really wanted to shift gears and work with some brighter, cheerful colors.  I remembered I had bought some fabric samples at my local quilt shop's SuperBowl Sunday sale:

These 3 sample cards were all from the same fabric line, and so they worked well together. The cards measure about 12 X 15", so  there was actually a lot of fabric on them.  Taking the one on the far right and spreading it out, there was all this:

Although not juvenile prints, I thought they would make a nice donation quilt for Quilts for Kids.  So, I played around with EQ software, and came up with this pattern for a quilt:

I needed to add just a few fabrics from my stash to have enough for a quilt top.  

The basic block is just one long rectangle and 2 squares, separated by white sashing.

The best part was playing with putting the fabrics up on the design board:

It looked a little chaotic at first glance, but when I added in the white sashing, it all worked out nicely.  Here is the completed top:

I might add an outer border, but it will have to wait until I can shop again at the fabric store, whenever that might be possible.

Hexies with yellow centers

In addition to the pieced blocks that I made each month for the Rainbow Scrap Challenge, I made appliqued hexagon blocks.   

Prior to the challenge, I had a stack of English Paper Pieced hexies in a rainbow of hues:

I sorted them out by color and picked a batch each month to applique to a white background:

By the end of the challenge year, I had them all appliqued:

I had purposely appliqued them to an oversized white background square so that I could trim them up evenly when I was ready to sew them together.  Once again, I turned to my trusty Tucker Trimmer ruler to get them perfectly sized.  By positioning  the center point of the ruler over the center of the middle hexagon, I was able to size them all to a uniform  4 inch size.

Now they had a more cozy setting:

I chose to border them with a narrow yellow inner border, and a red outer border with yellow cornerstones.  I plan on using a solid red binding to corral those yellow cornerstones in with the rest of the gang.

I'm going to be make this into a Spring table topper for my kitchen.  Those bright "depression era" fabrics are anything but depressing.  

Another finish that would probably still be in a drawer if it hadn't been for the motivation of the Rainbow Scrap Challenge.   You can see what this year's Rainbow Scrappers are creating here.

Rainbow Wrapup

Last year, I participated in the Rainbow Scrap Challenge but never got around to posting my finished quilt tops.

Each month, I made six Birds in the Air blocks and one Crumb block from the chosen color.

Eventually I had quite the rainbow of "birds".

I chose primary colored blocks and made this arrangement:

I added a bright border containing all the colors and the finished top looked like this:

Here's a closeup of the border fabric:

I still had all the pink/turquoise/fuschia blocks to work with, plus some extra primary colored birds so I put them together in a second quilt top:

Here is the border fabric I used for that one:

I was fortunate that both border fabrics were acquired for only $1.00 a yard at my quilt guild's yard sale last year.  Both quilt tops are child sized and were donated to my local chapter of Quilts for Kids.

I still had all the Crumb blocks to play with:

I decided to put them together in a wonky setting:

To get the wonky look, each block is sewn to asymmetrical borders, which were cut from rectangles of a splashy paint print fabric.

Here's an example of the pink block:

I ended up with this youthful quilt top:

In the end, I'm not crazy about it.  I would not have chosen the bright blue sashing if I had been working at home, but I sewed this together at a quilt retreat and the blue sashing was what I had with me.  However, I think a child will find it a fun distraction to cuddle under, so it was donated to Quilts for Kids as well.

Thank you , Angela, at Soscrappy for hosting another year of the Rainbow Scrap Challenge.  You can see what other scrappy creations are being sewn up for the Rainbow Scrap Challenge 2020 over at the link-up here.

For My Father

I was blessed to have a wonderful father.  He has been gone four years now and I still miss him every day, especially on Father's Day.    A few years ago, I made a quilt for my mother using his flannel plaid shirts , and this past year I decided to make a quilt for myself using his cotton summer shirts.

Dad's favorite color was blue, and it was reflected in the clothing he chose.  I had 12 different summer plaid shirts to work with, and most of them were blue so they played together nicely.

The pattern I chose was called "Cool Summer Porch" by Eleanor Burns.  The title alone seemed to make it the perfect pattern choice.

To start, I deconstructed the shirts and ironed the pieces flat.

Each shirt sleeve yielded two squares of fabric which I then subcut on the diagonal.  I cut them all individually so that I could be sure to line up the plaids with the straight edge of the ruler.

One triangle was sewn to each side of a white strip of fabric:

The resulting quilt was supposed to look something like this, according to my Electric Quilt software:

In the end, I eliminated the horizontal and vertical white sashing because it competed visually with the lines in the plaids, and I rearranged the direction of the white stripe.

The final result is this:

Of the 12 shirts I used, I was able to find a photos of my Dad wearing 9 of them.  I will be adding a pocket to the back of the quilt with copies of the photos as a keepsake.

Happy Father's Day to all the dads.  💗

A new life for an old bag

After many good years of service, my wood frame knitting bag looked like this:

The fabric at the corners was shredding:

The silky fabric interior was falling apart:

And the faded little ruffled accent just wasn't cutting it anymore:

I had a pretty blue printed panel that was given to me for free.  It was intended to be used to make pillows, but it would make a nice knitting bag too.  I figured that even if I goofed up, I had nothing to lose.

The only way to remove the old fabric bag was to cut it off from the wooden frame.   That would be easy enough, but how to attach a replacement bag?  I decided to try velcro.

I made the bag similar to any tote bag with a lining, but instead of handles, I made sleeves with velcro:

For the bottom of the bag, where the expandable legs are housed, I added another velcro sleeve:

View showing bottom of the bag.

And for the interior, I had just enough of a pale blue floral to make a lining with a pocket.

This is what the bag looked like before being attached to the wooden frame:

Here is what it looks like after!