Challenge Met and UFO done!

Back in January, the program committee at the Oxford Quilt Guild issued a challenge.  Each person that wanted to participate was asked to bring in a yard of batik material and a pair of scissors.  We stood in a big circle and listened for instructions...  Fold the fabric in half, snip it at the fold, rip it in half, drop half in front of us and pass the other half to the person on our right.  "Fold it, snip it, rip it, drop it, pass it!"  This was repeated with until each of us had 7 pieces of batik fabric in various sizes in the pile on the floor in front of us.  The challenge was to make something with our fabric, including a piece of each fabric.  We could add other fabrics to the project, if we wanted to.   Here are my seven fabrics.   

I put my fabrics in a plastic bin to give myself some time to ponder...

Then, COVID-19 arrived and the meeting where the projects were to be revealed was not to be.  Last week, it was announced that we would be having a Zoom meeting in August where we would share our challenge projects...the deadline pushed me to get this project out of the box and done this past week. 

I made some square in a square blocks and trimmed most of them to be asymmetrical.  I played around with them to figure out how to make them into a wall hanging.  (the brown patch is just my table!) I slept on it and came to the conclusion that this was not where I wanted to go with this project. 

I made some more squares, and added a few more fabrics and ended up with this. 

Next, how to quilt it...another night of sleeping on it and an idea formed. 

There are some spots where I stitched in the ditch and the line of stitching disappears, but it is there. I used turquoise thread. The binding is the same fabric as the middle square.   I hand stitched the binding on this one--one of my favourite parts of the quilt making process. 

The backing was made from stash fabric.  I'm using what I have as much as possible!

Done in plenty of time for the August meeting!

Julie, the long arm quilter, finished my Scrappy Trips quilt in no time and I trimmed it up and applied the binding by machine this week.  I sewed the binding to the front first and then folded it around to the back. I used a narrow zigzag stitch to sew it down.  My stiletto came in handy to keep the binding folded over as it entered the presser foot.  In retrospect, this would have been easier if I had sewn the binding to the back of the quilt and then did the zigzag from the front of the quilt.  Live and learn. 

Here is a picture of the quilting.  This quilt will be donated to the hospice and will be washed often and should hold up well. 

Here is the whole quilt. 

On the knitting front, I finished another dishcloth this week.  

I will likely try another pattern for my next one.  

I made a few fabric postcards over the last couple of weeks.  They are all in the mail and some have arrived at their destinations. 

My daughter finished her latest cross stitch city--Vienna. Such vibrant colours!

She sent me this picture of Finn tonight...so funny!  

He had his hair cut this week and is feeling much cooler in this hot weather. 

More garden pictures from this week...

I will link up with Kathy for Slow Sunday Stitching in the morning.   Take a look and see what everyone is up to.  The link is in my sidebar.  I will be doing some more knitting tomorrow. 

Have a good week. 

Modern Swap Blocks

Sorry I have been MIA for the last couple of weeks.  I have been doing lots of sewing but it has almost all been secret sewing which I can't share here yet.  I have also been working on blocks for a swap and since I finished them today, I decided to show them on my blog. I have participated in Barb's modern block swap three times now.  The first year, we made broken dishes blocks with red and another solid colour.

The second year, we swapped churn dash blocks in jewel tones.

(I have all of these blocks in bags, ready to make into something...waiting for inspiration to hit! They are on my UFO list to be done sometime in the next 6 months or so.)

This year, we are exchanging star blocks.  I made one to make sure the size was going to be ok, and it was!

I used a variety of colours of solids along with some of my black and white prints for the centres.

By the time I was finished sewing all of my blocks for the swap, I found that I had some extra flying geese so I made myself a few extra stars which I will add to the ones I receive from Barb for the swap.

Thanks, Barb, for organizing the swap.  I can't wait to get my parcel back in the mail in January sometime. 

I visited my daughter last weekend...there was Christmas shopping, Christmas movies and walks with Finn.

LMQG Swap: What is it?

Members of the London Modern Quilt Guild are swapping small quilts with members of the Ancaster Modern Quilt Guild.  Christine and I both decided to participate in the swap. We received the name and preferences of our swap partners in February and the quilts were due at our July meeting this past Saturday.  Now that my quilt is handed in, I can show it to you on my blog!

I started by making some random sized building blocks with some brightly coloured scraps.

I was on a roll and did not take any more process pictures as I put it together in two evening sewing sessions.  I used a light grey diagonal mesh print for my background. It was fun to figure out how to piece it together from my building blocks. At this point, I showed it to my husband to see if he could tell what it is...his guess...A HAT!  He was wrong.

I quilted it with fuchsia thread...the lines are the width of a piece of green painter's tape and the second set of lines are two pieces of painter's tape wide.  Painter's tape was my friend when I was quilting this quilt!  Next, I did diagonal lines through every other intersection in both directions...I'm not sure that is a good explanation, so I will show you...

The idea for the quilting came from Jacquie Gering's book "Walk" and also from the two day walking foot quilting class that I took with Jacquie a couple of years ago.  I think the quilting makes my quilt sparkle!

Several years ago, my friend, Erin, gave me a couple of yards of this fabric. It makes an interesting backing for my swap quilt and the colours are similar to those on the front.

It is bound in fuchsia grunge fabric.  Have you guessed what I was trying to depict yet?   Yup--it is a SEWING MACHINE! I hope my swap partner likes it!  Maybe she will find a spot to hang it in her sewing room.

Building Houses with Jacquie Gering

I have taken classes with Jacquie Gering, past president of the Modern Quilt Guild, several times.  The first class was stitch and flip which I took with other members of the London Friendship Quilters Guild.  You can see my stitch and flip garden here.   My next class with Jacquie was at Black Creek Pioneer Village "Quilts at the Creek" and was all about improvisational piecing.   Last year, Jacquie was in St. Mary's and taught a two day "Quilting with Your Walking Foot" class.    Jacquie was a teacher before she quit her job to quilt full time.  She is energetic and enthusiastic and takes great delight in passing on what she has learned as she explores modern quilt making.  Jacquie is a life-long learner and encourages her students to keep trying new things.  Jacquie teaches concepts and then sets her students free to make their own individual projects using what they have learned.

This past Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday, I took two classes with Jacquie.  On Monday, Christine, Carol and I participated in her "Mid-century Modern Houses" workshop in St. Mary's, sponsored by Hyggeligt, a fabric store specializing in Kaffe Fasset fabrics in St. Mary's.  We were asked to bring a focus fabric (a print) and lots of solid scraps as well as some larger solids and a background fabric.

First, we cut up our fabrics into squares and rectangles of various random sizes.

You can see my focus fabric has cameras on it!  Jacqui encouraged us to use fabrics with colours from our focus fabrics as well as fabrics that just "go" with those colours, including some bolder colours.

We chain pieced pairs and then put the pairs together to make building blocks for our houses.

Here is my first house:

We started with simple and then explored other shapes and sizes of houses.

This house has a carport!  One of the other quilters thought a smart car would fit perfectly in my carport!

Next, I added a house with an attic.

Every house quilt needs an outhouse!

Here is my neighbourhood by the end of the day.  I have more ideas for future neighbourhood development... The turquoise grunge fabric will be my background.

Thanks, Jacquie for a fun day!   I will blog about the second class later.

Weekly Sewing Report

These blogposts are becoming a weekly report of my sewing activities. There are just not enough hours in the day to blog any more often than once a week!  The fabric postcard above was made this past week for the London Friendship Quilters' Guild fabric postcard exchange. I made another one as well which is in the mail to a friend that I have not seen in a while. The fabric is leftover from the pillowcase I made myself recently. I quilted it on the diagonal, but you can't really see it in the picture.

I also made two placemats this week for Meals on Wheels--they will be put into giftbags for shut in seniors in London at Christmas. The two blocks are orphan blocks leftover from another project.

Christine and I got together on Wednesday night to work on our RRCB quilts. I put some of my blocks together and cut the strips for the pieced border. I hope to get some more blocks together this week and work on the pieced border at the annual Quilt 'til You Wilt day next Saturday.

Christine worked on her daughter's quilt. She has all her RRCB blocks together already!

Today, Pam from Mad About Patchwork did a workshop for our guild where we learned how to do not one but two quilts!

In the morning, we worked on "Through the Trees"--

And "Quartered Squares" in the afternoon.


(Those are both Pam's versions of these quilts!)

I used some flower fabric that I purchased years ago with some co-ordinating brights  for my Through the Trees quilt.

We had to cut all of our fabrics the same size, stack them up in a certain order and then slice in a wonky way.  We then reordered the strips so that each block would be different...

It did not take long to sew the 8 blocks together. We talked about various ways of putting the blocks together...I decided to make a wonky coins quilt with bright green (Kona Sour Apple) sashing and border. I even managed to finish this top before the end of the day, although it still needs a little trimming at the top and bottom...

I have picked out some pink fabric for the binding--I will have to search though my stash to see if I have any suitable fabric for the backing.

I decided to use solids for my Quartered Squares quilt and got one block done.  There is a lot of cutting for this quilt and I did not get all of it done. I decided that I needed to have one block completed as an example of what to make at home!  There are at least a dozen different solids in this quilt.

Another project to work on at Quilt 'til You Wilt....

This week, I hope to get some more RRCB blocks together and get my fabrics cut for the QS quilt. I have to get everything ready for QTYW too...

Until next time... Happy sewing!