Guild Challenge

Every year, my guild has multiple challenges. The thinking is that with several choices, more people will be encouraged to participate. The problem is that I always feel like I have to do ALL of them. LOL. This year we have 4 challenges:

UFO Challenge: Finish any quilt that you have not previously shown at one of our meetings. That one shouldn't be too much of a stretch.

Friendship Circles Challenge: Make any quilt (or quilty thing) that has circles on it. Circles can be the quilting design, the pattern of the piecing or applique, the fabric, the shape of the quilt, whatever. I have a bullseye quilt in my UFO pile, I'm going to try to finish that for the circle challenge.

Winter Challenge: Make something that either reminds you of winter, or shows what you like to do or where you would like to be in the winter (if I wish I were on the beach, I could do a beach theme quilt, I suppose). I have an idea for this involving coloring and redwork, but I haven't started it yet.

Cheater Quilt Challenge - using any 'cheater' fabric, we are to make a quilt. The only guidelines are that just ading a border to panel is not enough. This is the challenge that I am currently working on. Ann from the Sunshine Quilts list shared a toy block fabric and challenged us to use it to make quilts to donate to either Wrap Them in Love or Wrap A Smile. I figured that I might as well kill two birds with one stone, so I'm going to do this. Here are my fabric choices:




Here are the blocks. Now I need to work on finishing the top.

A raffle quilt

My quilt guild meets in the recreation room at the local Masonic Home and Hospital. We have held our meetings there for many, many years and they are very accomodating and helpful to us. In the past, we have donated many quilts to the residents of the home. Every year they hold a big event called Grand Masters Day. I don't know the particulars of it, but I think it is something that the various Masons organizations hold on a regional level to get together and have meetings, social gatherings and some community interactions. Back in 1997, we noticed that they always raffled a quilt as one of the activities for Grand Masters Day. A guild member who works at the Masonic Home & Hospital found out that the were buying the quilt somewhere down in Lancaster PA or something like that. That year, we decided to make a quilt and donate it to them. It is something that we haven't done since. Fast forward to last year: someone in our group suggested that we make them a raffle quilt again. So we voted to do that, and we used the Union Square block that you see in the quilt above. Each member participating made two blocks for the quilt, and one block for a raffle among ourselves. Some guild members put the top together, another longarmer in our group quilted it. I didn't win the blocks from our raffle, but now I'm going to buy some raffle tickets, and maybe I'll be lucky enough to win the finished quilt. Or more likely, I'll use the pattern and make my own.

Please note that they quilt is displayed folded in half over a pole. The space in the lobby of the Masonic Hospital was not big enough for it to be hung full length. This quilt is probably about a queen size.

Great Guild Meeting & Crumb Quilts

Last night, I was (finally) able to attend my local quilt guild meeting, after missing the last 5 or 6 because of scheduling conflicts with Thing One, Thing Two and the big-but-not-yet-grown-up thing. I am SO glad that I managed to get to this meeting...we had the best program that I've heard in quite some time. Our speaker was Meredith Vastas, an employee at the Mashantucket Pequot Museum and Research Center in Eastern Connecticut. Meredith is a quilter and an anthropologist in addition to being a Native American. As such, her interest revolves around the Native American traditions related to quilting and all things textile. She told us about her grandmother experiences in a boarding school on a reservation in South Dakota and how the nuns taught the students to sew and quilt. We saw a number of slides that depict typical Native American quilts, and she explained the symbolism of the designs, the colors and the 'giveaways' where people were given quilts. It was very interesting, and I am hoping to be able to visit the Museum sometime soon to see all the exhibits there (and maybe I'll visit the casino while I'm there).

Today I am going to share pictures of a few of the quilts in that pile that I showed in my last post. Today, Finn shared a picture of one of her Mile-A-Minute quilts, which is pretty much the same as the crumb quilts I make a lot of . That post inspired me to chose the crumb quilts in my pile to share today. I love them because they are so scrappy. I imagine the child who receives the quilt spending a lot of time looking at all the various fabrics and noticing the silly little novelty things, the bright fabrics, the geometric patterns, etc. I also like taking these humble blocks and looking for new settings for them. Please excuse my lousy photography. Its me, not the pictures. Plus I couldn't get anyone to hold the quilts for me, so I clipped them onto my rolling garment rack and it was a little windy and started to get shady. Sorry! So here they are:






This is one of the tops I put together last weekend. You'll notice it has the same background fabric as the Peppermint Sticks quilt I showed on Monday. Hopefully it will be quilted soon. I think it will get a darker purple border.



I like the setting on this one. It reminds me of how much I want to do a row quilt.



This is another one that I was quite happy with. You probably can't tell from the picture, but the yellow sashing fabric has little bumblebees on it. The black border fabric was donated. Actually most of the fabric in the crumb blocks were donated too.



This one is fun too. I have to remember that I like the crumb blocks side by side a lot more than with a plain block in between. Somehow they look a lot more interesting in fours or in a row.

Chinese Coins

This top is made from some of the extra chinese coins strips I made for Heartstrings. Actually I intended to make Bonnie's String X quilt, but I got carried away with the strings and made way too many rectangles. I still have the 48 sections for the String X, but in the meantime I made this top, which is a variation of a top I saw in a book. Peppermint Sticks is a design by Terry Atkinson in her Spring Cleaning book...this top is pretty much the same, but the size of the blocks and the proportion of the pieced strips vs. background is different. I couldn't find my book when I started piecing, so I went with my faulty memory. My blocks have 4" wide X 10" long finished striped pieces, and the background rectangles are 3" X 10" finished. The ones in the book have 2"X9" finished pieced strips and 3 1/2" X 9" finished background strips. Oh well. In all, this top is about 40X60 and I haven't decided if it will get borders or not. Maybe it will be quilted soon.String X quilt, but I got carried away with the strings and made way too many rectangles. I still have the 48 sections for the String X, but in the meantime I made this top, which is a variation of a top I saw in a book. Peppermint Sticks is a design by Terry Atkinson in her Spring Cleaning book...this top is pretty much the same, but the size of the blocks and the proportion of the pieced strips vs. background is different. I couldn't find my book when I started piecing, so I went with my faulty memory. My blocks have 4" wide X 10" long finished striped pieces, and the background rectangles are 3" X 10" finished. The ones in the book have 2"X9" finished pieced strips and 3 1/2" X 9" finished background strips. Oh well. In all, this top is about 40X60 and I haven't decided if it will get borders or not. Maybe it will be quilted soon.

The pile is going

Tomorrow, this pile of quilts (28 of them!) will be out of my house and headed to their new homes. I think there are still a couple more hiding down in the laundry room, but I'm not in a mood to stress myself looking for them.

Vacation is over!

I lived thru the dance recital week. Then, school vacation started. I spent about 5 days in Vermont with the kids. Did I mention that we had snow and torrential rains during the week?? Anyway, school started again today. Thank goodness.

I did spend a bunch of time working on quilting projects during the vacation week. I quilted and bound two quilts, I pieced two more sets of blocks into tops, and I worked on a bunch more blocks for various projects. I'll share pictures later tonight or tomorrow, I need to find someone to help hold things up for me to take the pictures.

I've got a pile of about 30 donation quilts that I need to get out of here ASAP. Most of them are for Ronald McDonald House, some are for the NICU at UConn Medical Center and a few are for Wrap A Smile or Wrap Them in Love. A lot of them have been hanging around here for a while and just haven't gotten to where they need to go. Since I've got guild tomorrow night, I'm going to drag them out and send them on their way.

The picture that I will share today is an example of why it is often difficult for me to get any quilting done. Their names are Buddy (the Maine Coon mix) and Peanut Butter (the orange one).

Of dance recitals, weather forecasts & sleepless nights

Ugh. Dance recital week. I'm exhausted, stressed and freaked out. Stop reading now if you expect something quilt-y because this isnt going to be quilt-y.

So, our dance studio has somewhere around 500 students. They put on 4 shows because there are just too many dances to do it in any less than that. We always have three dress rehersals (one per show, the fourth show is virtually all repeats of dances in other shows, but they need to run it for seating capacity reasons).

Anyway, the first night of dress rehersal is generally a mess because of needing to block things on stage, check the costumes, set the lights, check the cuts of all the music, and arrange the other million details. Every year we all leave the first dress rehersal going "Wow, what a mess" but it always comes together and looks fantabulous during the show.

On Monday we had the first dress rehersal. It was a total fiasco. Everyone was walking around totally freaking out and noone could figure out what was going so wrong. In the end, we had to end the rehersal at 11 because that is the deadline set by the venue for using the facility (rehersal started at 4). And at that point, TWELVE numbers hadn't even gotten on stage. A lot of them were rushed thru with no blocking done, music still not right, etc. I've never seen it that bad.

Then we came home and I watched the news: SNOW predicted for Thursday. Uh oh. If school is cancelled due to snow, there won't even BE a dress rehersal that night (and therefore for the Saturday night show, which has some of my kids dances in it that aren't in any of the other shows).

As a result of this, I've spent two sleepless nights. I mentioned this to some of the other moms at rehersals tonight, and as it turns out, I'm not the only sleepless mom in town.

Did I mention that there is a lot of pressure for this show to be really good this year because it is the studio's 50th anniversary this year?? They have lots of big sets, several long production numbers and a bunch of extra stuff they don't usually have in the show. Yup, big time stress.

Well, tonights rehersal went much better. And the weather forecast has been changed to maybe a coating of snow on the grass, then changing to rain. Thank goodness.

But perhaps the worst thing about this week is that the dance recital is this week (instead of the normal first week of May)...because this year, the dance recital runs into my Lancaster Quilt Show weekend. This is the first time in 11 years that I have missed the quilt show. I've been there pregnant, with a newborn, with a toddler, with my Mom and no kids, with the whole family, etc. But I've been there every year. And this week I'm not there at all. And I am very unhappy about that.

My afghan

I finally finished weaving all those ends into my afghan! If you are a knitter or a crocheter, please don't enlarge the picture and look to closely! LOL. My edges are very wobbly, apparently I kept messing up the number of stitches at the ends of the rows so it gets wider and narrower all over the place. I also didn't know that I was not supposed to just knot the new yarn color to the one I was running out of, so the joins are pretty ugly in spots. But still, I am very happy with it. It is huge and comfy, warm and very colorful. The next time will be better technically, but this makes me happy anyway.

I guess it is like my quilting mantra: I do this for fun, not perfection. I do it for the joy of creating and I'm not worried about those mismatched points, wobbbly seams, uneven stitches or whatever. I'm having fun doing it, it keeps me out of trouble and it helps keep me sane.

This coming week is the craziest, most insane, most stressful and most fun week of teh year for my family: Dance recital week. This is Thing One's 8th year of dance, Hubby is dancing as well, this is his fifth year. Our studio is the biggest in the area, I think, with over 500 studios. This year is pretty awesome because it is the 50th year of the studio (the original owner's daughter now runs it, and the owner's child is in Thing One's classes). We have dress rehersals on Monday, Wednesday and Thursday. The shows are on Friday night and Saturday...on Saturday we have a morning show, a matine and an evening show. It is so much fun but by the end of the week I will be totally wiped out. I'll try to hop online and share a photo or two during the week. Needless to say, no quilting will be accomplished this week.

Carrot Sticks

Thing Two and I took off for a few days, I figured it would be a good chance for me to sew, which I haven't had much time for lately. I took a number of projects with me, and I worked on several, but didn't accomplish as much as I wanted to. The big thing that I did get completed, I am really happy with.

I started hearing about a table runner about two weeks ago while I was reading the emails on Pat Sloan's Yahoo Group. It was a cute carrot shaped table runner. Too cute. So I went over to the All People Quilt website to find the pattern. Somehow I couldn't manage to find my little orange stash that I purchased back in October for a halloween wallhanging, so I bought these



I started cutting and sewing the strips for this, and I realized that I had cut way too many strips. So I just kept sewing and sewing and before long I had three adorable table runners. One for me, one for my Mom and one for my MIL. I think that I actually did the pleats on the tops incorrectly, but I'm happy with them the way they are.



This is the one I'm keeping for myself because it is my favorite combination of the green tops