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.  

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.

6 months of Blogger Girls

This month, the last 2 blocks of Monique Dillard's Blogger Girls Block of the Month were posted.  Here are my blocks for this month:

The block on the right had a mind of it's own, and it came out looking like this at first:

The setting for this quilt requires 13 blocks, so an additional block from one of the previous months had to be made.  I chose the Dutchman's Puzzle block from February and made it in the traditional coloring for my 13th block:

I am hoping to get the quilt top all put together by July 1st, in time for the finishing instructions.  I'm kind of going to miss making 2 of these fun little squares each month.

10 Block Pile Up

I'm all caught up with the latest Blogger Girls BOM.  This month the blocks were variations of the "Double T" quilt pattern.  I made the first block to emphasize the "T":

For the second block, there was a addition of a small square in the corner units, which led to all kinds of possibilities.  I ended up using just 3 fabrics and sewing up this one:

To sew the second version, Monica showed a really cool method for making these corner units:

To make two of these units at the same time, you start with a large rectangle plus 2 squares of the background fabric, and 2 small rectangles of the purple fabric:

Sew a background square to each of the purple rectangles, and press towards the background square:

Flip the top one 180 degrees and sew the two units together:

Pressing this unit is the key.  You snip the seam allowance in the middle, and press the long seam in opposite directions:

Draw a 45 degree line from the top left corner towards the bottom, and from the bottom right corner towards the top:

Put this unit right sides together with the large white rectangle and sew directly on the lines:

Cut them apart in the area between the 2 lines, leaving a 1/4 inch seam allowance:

Press open:

The measurements Monica gave us made slightly oversized units, so out came my faithful Tucker Trimmer ruler and it was easy to size them to 2 1/2 inch squares:

I made two sets at the same time so that I had four corner units for my block:

Pretty cool trick!

This month we are supposed to make 3 blocks instead of the usual 2, but I am going to wait to make the 3rd one until I see all 12 blocks in case I want to use certain colors for overall balance.

It's not to late to jump into this BOM.  All the instructions for the blocks are still available for free at this page
on Monica's blog.

Last Minute

I can't believe that tomorrow is May 1st.  Two new May  blocks for the Blogger Girls BOM will be posted, and as of today I had not yet done the April blocks.  Thankfully, I got them both done today.  Here is the first one:

And here is the second one:

The difference between  the two block patterns is the the top block has the "house" shapes (in red) pointing outward, and the bottom block has them pointing inward.  I made one other change to the second block and that was to use a "square in a square" (the purple and yellow) instead of a plain square for the center unit.

These blocks are really fun to do, but choosing fabrics can be a little tricky since the pieces are so small.  If you use a larger print, it can get muddy looking.   I placed a quarter in the next photo to show the scale.  These little cuties finish at 6 inches.

I'm not going to bother putting away the 30's repro fabrics, and hopefully I will be more timely with the May blocks.

Sewing for a snowy day

The second installment of Monique Dillard's Blogger Girls BOM was posted on February 1st.  Here are the two blocks I made from this month's pattern:

I had a little trouble deciding on fabrics for the block on the left, because most of my 30's repro fabrics tend to read as "mediums" and it can be hard to get a good contrast.    I started out with  the pink fabric of Mary and her Little Lamb,  and worked from there.

Both blocks are made up of 8 Flying Geese units.  Monique's method for making the blocks uses a neat little "Fit to be Geese" ruler, but since I don't have one of those, I made mine using a ruler that I already had called the "Quick Trim and Circle Ruler", using the method I blogged about here.

It's not too late to get started on this quilt if you are interested.  By making 2 blocks each month, the timetable is only 6 months instead of the usual 12 for a Block of the Month.  I am enjoying seeing how much variety you can get in a block pattern just by rearranging the fabrics, and playing with these cheerful colors on on otherwise gloomy winter day.

Fabric BINGO

Tonya at Hillbilly Handiworks is hosting an online BINGO game which looks like fun, so I have decided to play along.  Each participant makes their own fabric Bingo card and submits a photo of it to Tonya to be entered in the game.

Here is mine:

Here is my list of words to go with my fabric:

B - Quilt  Scotties  Sailor Children Tulips

I - Ducks Bouquet Polkadot Stripe Basket

N - Daisy Circle FREE Puppy Stars

G - HumptyDumpty  Clover Goose Butterfly Rabbit

O - Clown  Flowergirl Bubbles Smilies Squares

It was fun to revisit my 30's repro fabrics and choose 25 squares to make up the card.  The whole thing was done in an afternoon.  For letters I used stickers that I had.

If you would like to play, you need to make up your Bingo card, post it on your blog and link to it on this post before April 22nd.  More information, including rules, prizes and a tutorial on making a fabric card can be found here.

Hope you decide to join in the game!

It's a dog's life for me

Lately I seem to be surrounded by dogs.

There are pairs of Scotties on this fabric:

And sweet little puppies frolicking on this one:

These pups look like they have mischief on their mind:

And who can forget the little circus dogs?

All in all, these great little dogs have found there way into my home.

But wait! How did this one get there???

Guess who came home from the animal shelter with us yesterday?

This little guy!

He has found his way not only into our home, but into our hearts.

I'm sure this won't be the last photo you see of him! Please forgive me if I don't comment on anyone's blog for a few days,

it's because my time will be consumed with puppy-training!

Before the hexagons there were pineapples

Long before I started making hexagons, there was this quilt.

The pieced blocks that make up the center of the quilt were made using a pattern called "Pineapple Blossom" by Bonnie Hunter. Each block uses 3 sizes of strips, and being a lover of scrappy quilts, I made neat little piles of as many different fabrics as I could find.

When the pieced blocks were completed and sewn together, I decided I wanted to add a border with some applique. I cut some white fabric into wide borders and then placed some leftover strips aound the quilt in a few different locations to decide where I wanted the appliqued flowers to go. This is just one way that a digital camera is such a handy tool in quilmaking. I took pictures of each of the arrangements so I could compare them and see what I liked best:

I liked the arrangement with applique in the opposite corners, so I pulled out some graph paper and decided on how to arrange the flowers and leaves.

It was easiest to complete the applique on the borders first, and then sew them onto the quilt. Here's what the appliqued flowers looked like after the quilting was done, and a closeup of the quilting in the plain white corners:

I didn't do the machine quilting. I'm more of a stitch in the ditch kind of quilter, and I just didn't know how to handle all that white space in the borders, so I had it professionally quilted by a longarmer.

I had lots of strips leftover and some of them are ending up as hexagons for my current project. However, any notion I had of using up my 30's scraps for this hexagon project is pretty amusing to me, now that I see how many hexagons can be made from just one 1 1/2" strip. :-)