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.