Modern Quilt Guild Swap

Several months ago, I signed up to participate in a swap at the London Modern Quilt Guild.  Our swap partners were from the Ancaster Modern Quilt Guild and we were given some information about our swap partners and their preferences.  The quilts were to be no bigger than 24" X 24". We handed our quilts in at the July meeting and they were to be distributed at the August meeting when the Ancaster Guild members would be visiting.

You may remember the quilt that I made--my husband thought it was a hat...

I was not able to be at the August meeting as I was away on vacation so Christine brought my quilt to me a couple of weeks after I got back.

My swap partner's name is Nicole and she wrote me this lovely note that came with my quilt:

I had mentioned that I liked liberated quilts, such as those made by Gwen Marston.  I love my liberated log cabin quilt, Nicole!  The colours are wonderful and the quilting is divine!  Thanks so much for swapping with me.   Christine told me that Nicole knew that the quilt I made for her was not a hat!

(I'm not sure what Kristin and Nicole were looking at while this picture was taken!)

If I get another chance to participate in a swap, I think I will jump in with both feet!

Design Workshop with Jacquie Gering

I spent three days in workshops with Jacquie Gering last week.  You can read about the first workshop here.  The second workshop was two days of learning to design the Jacquie Gering way!  We were told we would not need our sewing machines until Day 2!  We spend much of the first day using paper and scissors to experiment with achieving "exchange" (balance, harmony...) in our paper designs.  My first attempt is shown above and I got a gold star from Jacquie for this one!  My second attempt was not even worthy of a picture before it landed in the trash can!  I made two more--

By lunch time, we had lots of ideas up on the design wall on one side of the room.

Next, we looked at some of Jacquie's quilts and discussed the designs, some of which she loved and others that she did not love.  We talked about ways that some of them could have been designed differently to create different looks.

Our design challenge for the rest of the afternoon was to play with some paper blocks that Jacquie gave to us to create more quilt designs.  I could not believe the number of possibilities that the participants came up with in this exercise!  Here are a few of my designs.

On the second day, we discussed moving from paper or craft-foam designs to fabric.  I decided to skip the mock up of my design idea on using craft foam and moved straight to fabric.  I make 18 liberated drunkard's path units and started playing with placement on the design wall.

I have done a lot of garment sewing in my life so a few curved seams did not faze me.

At first, my blocks were too big so I ended up cutting them down to a smaller size and playing some more.

Jacquie and I played with this 16 patch design for quite a while, moving pieces here and there and trying to find a pleasing design.  After a while, she left to work with someone else.  I stared at what I had on the design wall and all I could see was the curved arrow on the upper right corner.   I then came up with this idea...

Others in the room, including Jacquie, concurred and after a bit of tweaking, this became my final design.   I sewed the blocks together and had my top together before the end of the day.

This was a fun and challenging workshop with ideas that will continue to influence the quilts that I make for a long time!  I already have my quilt basted and ready to quilt.  The quilting pattern is already chosen. I just need to find the right colour of thread...

Thanks again, Jacquie, for an amazing three days!

Liberated Sampler Blocks 1-8

I made my 8th liberated sampler block tonight.  Christine was here to sew with me--she was away at the cottage for the past couple of weeks so we spent lots of time catching up and chatting as we sewed. This is a variation of one of the blocks from 42Quilts.com.  The block that is suggested has 51 pieces in a 6" block.  I opted to do the easy version...

As promised, here is a picture of all of my blocks so far.  Eight down, only 56 to go!

I had hoped to make one a week but I don't always have time.  This quilt will be my long term project. 

Starting a New Project

A while ago, I saw that Jenifer at 42 Quilts.com is hosting a Modern Monday quilt along--she first did this quilt along in 2011 and has decided to run it again.  Many of the blocks are liberated versions of some traditional blocks.  I have not made a liberated quilt in a while so I decided to jump in and make my own version of the Modern Monday sampler quilt.  There are 64  6.5" blocks in total. A couple of weeks ago, I went searching through my stash for some fabrics to use for this project.  I found these three fat quarters that I purchased over a year ago and decided to use the colours in these fabrics for my version of the quilt.

I am not sure what line of fabric they are from as I cut off the selvages for my selvage collection...

I have some green, magenta and turquoise fabrics picked out as well as some grey which may be used for sashing. Tonight, I made my first four blocks.  I decided not to follow the directions that Jenifer is supplying on her blog...I am just going to look at each of her blocks and make my own version in my own way. 

Here is my first block--Crossroads.

My second block is a liberated Log Cabin--home of a cute little bird. 

Shoo-fly was up next. 

The last one I made was a liberated Churn Dash. 

I'm going to use a little bit of one of the focus fabrics in each block. 

I hope to make some more blocks next week when I get together to sew with Christine again next week. 

Flimsy Finish: Stitch and Flip Garden

I have spent much of my sewing time over the last couple of weeks working on finishing this UFO from a workshop by Jacquie Gering in the Spring of 2014.  You can see my other posts about this project here and here.  The toughest part of sewing this together was keeping all of those squares in the right order and the right orientation...I only had to unstitch one seam!!!

I decided to add some small leaves to the stems of the purple flowers.  I like the butterflies too!  I have some fun fabric in my stash for the backing of this quilt and will be quilting in myself on my new sewing machine using one of the walking foot quilting patterns that I learned at a recent workshop with Jacquie Gering.

Here are a few pictures from my garden and my MIL's garden.  She has a lovely magnolia tree in her yard.

I am linking up to Let's Be Social.

Modern Quilt Guild Retreat Wrap-Up.

The South Western Ontario Modern Quilters' retreat was a couple of weeks ago.  I have not had time to do a second blogpost about it until now...  Before the retreat, we were each paired with another person who would be attending so we could make and exchange lanyards.  My swap partner was Kathleen from Toronto.  She made me the beautiful lanyard in the picture above from a piece of Liberty fabric--the colours reminded her of Spring.  She also sent me a wonderful bar of chocolate which I shared with my husband.

I made her lanyard out of some black and white fabrics and a few solids that are in the London Modern Quilt Guild Logo.  We all wore our lanyards at the retreat with our nametags attached to the clasp.

 The weather was rather chilly the weekend of the retreat and the water in the bubbling rock fountain at the Elmhurst Inn was partly frozen in little balls of ice around the perimeter of the fountain.

I had to take the opportunity to take a few pictures. I managed to do this without falling on the slippery rocks around the fountain.

I showed the first project I worked on at the retreat in this blogpost...the pillow that became a wall hanging.

Next, I worked on some liberated stars which I will use to make some placemats for the winter season next year.   I have always wanted to make new placemats but just never seem to get around to working on them.  This year, I purchased some red patterned fabric at one of our guild meetings and I have been collecting some gray and white prints to go with it to make the placemats.

This one finishes at 3" square.  I made several star blocks in various sizes.

(oops--the picture is upside-down!)

This one is under construction.

Here is a picture of all of the stars that I made at the retreat. 

I need to make at least a dozen placemats to have enough for family gatherings so I still have more stars to make.   Each placemat will be different but will have the same red and white striped binding.  This past week, I finished off the 2nd half of my daughter's quilt so I hope to get back to making more stars soon. (after sewing the two halves together!)

We had lots of door prizes donated by various quilt stores and manufacturers and I won this bag which included batting, a magazine, some fabric, sewing machine needles and a gift certificate as well as a new seam ripper.  We all had a great weekend of sewing, eating and making new friends and I look forward to next year's retreat! 

Puttering in the Sewing Room

I have spent a few evenings in the sewing room during the last couple of weeks.  I made another house for my 30's prints neighbourhood--this is house #3.

I put together the 9th liberated basket quilt for my basket sampler quilt from the workshop I taught in January.  I used selvages for this basket.  If you look closely, you can see that the handle fabric also has scissors on it. I have some machine applique to do on one more block before I can assemble this quilt top.

 

Last week, I celebrated my birthday and my husband gave me a couple of quilting books..."Free Range Triangle Quilts" by Gwen Marston and Cathy Jones, and "Quilt Lovely" by Jen Kingwell.  There are lots of inspiring quilts in both books.  I was drawn to a quilted pillow in Jen's book and decided to make one for myself.  I need 16 paper pieced arcs for this pillow.  These are the first two arcs.

 

 

I have been working on more arcs and have 10 done now.  I need to go digging through my scraps before I make the last 6. They are not very big and will measure 2" in the finished blocks.  There is quite a bit of curved piecing in this pillow...I will get to that when I finish the arcs.

 

 

I have figured out the final layout for the modern wedge quilt.  I took the lighter wedges off the wall and will use them in another project.  I will be hand appliqueing the curvey parts onto the background, perhaps as my slow Sunday stitching project this weekend.

 

 

 

It was cold and frosty on my way to work this morning so I just had to stop the car at the side of a country road and take a few pictures.  Everything looked so sparkly!

 



Liberated Baskets Workshop

Today, I taught a liberated baskets workshop for a group of 8 quilters from the London Friendship Quilters' Guild. My friend, Christine, was there to help out as well. We started with a short discussion about Liberated Quilting and Christine and I talked about attending the Beaver Island Quilt Retreats where we were converted to liberated quilt making by Gwen Marston. (This is a quilt that Christine, Carol and I made for Gwen and gave to her at the final BIQR in 2013.--note the centre of the quilt is a liberated string basket!)

 

 

We started by learning how to make a simple liberated basket with a machine appliqued bias handle. 

 

Here is Maureen with her basket:

 

 

You can't tell from the picture, but Anne made all of her baskets mini sized. 

 

 

This is Lynsey's basket:

 

 

Striped fabrics are fun for the handles.

 

 

 

After everyone had made one basket, we got back together to talk about the endless possibilities for liberated basket blocks.  I showed lots of pictures of quilts from Gwen Marston's books of Gwen's and other quilters' basket quilts. Then, the magic happened.  Everyone got it!  Dozens of interesting and creative baskets emerged from the sewing machines around the room.

 

A flower pot basket by Anne:

 

 

 

A two handled purse by Pam:

 

 

Mary's Oriental Fabric purse:

 

 

Anne's double handled basket:

 

 

Lorraine's aqua basket on a wild background:

 

At the end of the day, we talked about how to put the blocks together--the blocks were not made all the same size. Each quilter had a chance to show off their blocks.

 

Anne's mini baskets--note that one fell over! She also made a pile of three baskets.

 

 

Lynsey's baskets (she is thinking of embroidering some flowers on the middle white piece.): 

 

Pam's baskets (the top left one is a clutch with a little bow on the top edge.):

 

Christine's blue Civil War fabric baskets:

 

 

Edith's Easter Baskets:

 

 

Susan's baskets (I love the orange handle on the blue basket!):

 

Lorraine's baskets (Love the stripes!)

 

 

Mary's Oriental Purses with fun handles:

 

 

 

Maureen used Wonder Under and machine blanket stitch for her handles. 

 

 

These are my baskets.  I am making a liberated basket sampler. 

 

 

I have another block started but not done yet.  This one will have flowers of some sort on the ends of the stems and I will likely add some leaves as well.

 

 

It was a great day. I was pleased that everyone went outside their usual style and embraced liberated quilt making for the day.