To Boston With Love... Calling all members to participate

I'm sure that everyone was, like me, shocked and horrifed by events in Boston this past week. With all its Irish connections, those of us who have family members there and the fact that thousands of students like me passed through, visited and lived there during our summer holidays in our college days, Boston has a special place in many Irish hearts including my own.

The Vancouver Modern Quilt Guild is coordinating a fantastic project - a collaborative effort of makers to bring peace and love from far and wide. They are planning a public exhibition of flags strung into banners to be displayed in Boston - hopefully in early June 2013.

I've seen pictures of flags springing up on Instagram in the last couple of days as other Modern Quilt Guilds and quilters around the world have started to participate and would love if our Irish guild could participate too. I (Sarah) will coordinate the collection and postage of flags, if you will make them and send them to me.

The guidelines for making them are here - you can use the tutorials provided, or make your own design within the guidelines so I would love if you would get sewing and get your flag in the post to me to reach me by 13th May next, as they need to get to Boston before May 31st and I want to allow ample posting time. I will ask for a very small contribution (approx a euro/pound each depending on the total cost) towards postage also. If you are not a signed up member (why not? join us please!), you can still contribute a flag if you want, I will accept flags from any Irish based quilter/sewist who would like to participate.

So please comment below, or email me at mqgireland@gmail.com to participate and I will send you back my address and answer any questions you have.

Don't forget to add your flags to the Flickr pool and please please spread the word :-)

What's New, Ruth?

Hello everyone.  My name is Ruth and I write about my projects over at Charly & Ben's Crafty Corner.  I made my first quilt about this time last year and am now working on my fifth quilt.   I was thrilled to bits when a family member asked me to make her a quilt for a single bed and had great fun searching for fabric and deciding on a layout that I thought would be perfect for her.  She was happy to leave it all up to me so I picked  this fabric range Coquette by Chez Moi.  Not having much of a stash I went out and bought everything (any excuse to go fabric shopping!) I thought something colourful in spring colours with stars would be great.  The background material is Kona Snow.

I had a pattern from Miss Rosies Quilt Co. called Bounce that uses scrappy stars so I modified this from a twin to a single bed quilt and so far so good.  I've gone from tiny squares to pieced stars.  Last week I trimmed them off centre to make them "Bounce" as per the pattern and sewed all 28 of them into a 4 x 7 layout. 

Now I'm working on the borders.  I'd like this to end up somewhere around the 58 x 78" for a single bed so I'm adding a scrappy border per the pattern and a nice wide solid border on the outside.  The scrappy border is made from the leftovers from the 28 stars +4 more layer cakes cut into strips and BGF strips.

It’s a lot of cutting and piecing but oh so pretty!  You can see a small part of the stencil I'm hoping to use to quilt this when the top is finished.  I'll be practicing this pattern before I touch this baby with my Free motion hopping foot!

The border is coming together slowly but I'm really happy with the result.  It's very hard to be random.  I've heard of a tip of putting all the pieces into a bag and using whatever is pulled out.  I may have to try that!

Ruth, thank you so very much for giving us a peek in your sewing room!  

What's new, Sonya?

I have been patch working for over a year and a half now and am surprised at just how much scrap fabric has built up in my sewing room. Finally I decided that if I did not want to be classed as a hoarder I had better decide on a project. Not having masses of experience in using scraps I finally decided to make a 2.5 inch square boys pram blanket.

I am using mainly Robert Kaufmann fabrics, just mixing in a few others to help keep the bright & colourful theme.  Here is my progress so far, I have 6 of the nine blocks finished. I work on it on & off as I come across scraps that tie in, but I am loving how it is coming together. Once its finished I plan on making a girl version with all the girls scraps I have in my sewing room:)

Thank you, Sonya, for giving a peek into your sewing room.  Please do come back and show us the finished quilt.  Anyone else have a WIP post to share?  Email Cindy at fluffysheepquilting(at)gmail(dot)com.

What's new, Irina?

Hello, I'm Irina and I write about my ever-growing list of projects at El Petit Taller.  I've been asked to tell you about what I'm working on at the moment. One of my many WIPs is a quilt for my son Conor, who has just turned 10 moths, so it's about time he had his own quilt!

I took part in a rainbow charm swap and had been adding squares from scraps, so with a good collection of 5 inch squares I decided to make rainbow stars inspired in this tutorial.

About the design of the quilt... I'm making it up as I go along!  But the idea, so far, is to make a square quilt, with the stars slightly tilted on a white sashing. I'd like to make small wonky stars where the corners of the starry blocks meet. I'm not sure if I'll add a border... I will need to see how the central panel looks like first and if I want to add more starry blocks, so I might ask you for advise when the moment comes!

Oh, and just let me tell you that I consider myself pretty new in modern quilting and I really love being inspired by the work of all the rest of you in the MQGI, so thank you!

Secret Table Runner

Hi, I am Anneliese and I blog at mail from the cheeky monkeys.  I was asked to write something about a project I am working on. It is still a secret but I mailed it today so I think I can talk about it.

Some weeks ago I was so pleased when a friend asked me to make her a table runner. I love to make them. It just takes some days and it is done. The pattern was on me and we decided to use the charm pack from Kate Spain "Serenade" I had at home with a cream solid. Just a little color in the cold winter time until spring finally arrives. (It was only a week ago they had heavy snowfall so it will take some more weeks until the first flowers will make it through!)

I wanted to use HSTs again. After a lot of trimming the most fun is to sit on the floor and play "memory" swapping the HSTs to find the perfect place for each. I think this worked out nice even if I could still be sitting there swapping HSTs. 

I have never done so much quilting on a table runner. I just did straight lines on the cream solid. It was so a lot of work but it was also lots of fun.

This time I finished the table runner with a triangle shape at the ends going with the pattern. Somehow I feel sad letting it go. Especially as the last days were very rainy and grey here in the West. 

I almost used the whole charm pack. There were only some HST left so I made a little mug rug and added this to the parcel. An other surprise as she did not want to see the finished table runner. So you are the first to see it! 

So the table runner is on its way to Austria and I hope it arrives soon! I don't like the time waiting until I hear the parcel arrived safely. I hope nothing goes wrong. 

This was my finish for January! A little distraction from the other projects which are waiting to be completed. Thanks for letting me share it!

Anneliese

What's new, Judith?

Hi there!  I'm Judith from Just Jude.

I've been invited to tell you about a WIP I'm working on at the moment.

I'm currently working on my class projects for next term, which means making class samples and writing up the patterns in advance of the classes.

Next term I hope to teach a new quilt design called 'Baby Bear Paw':



The idea behind this design is to take a traditional block like Bear's Paw, and modernise it.  You can see here when you put 4 Bear Paw blocks together you get a giant star!  This baby quilt will be approx. 49" x 49". 

And because this block design is so versatile, you could easily upsize and create a Mama Bear Paw Quilt (approx. 73" x 73"):

I've quantified the fabric requirements and have decided to use a fq bundle of Savannah Bop which I won at FQ Retreat last June.

I'm very fortunate to be in the position of owning a Sizzix, and the 4.5" hst die has made light work of the cutting out.

Using the Sizzix means the hsts don't need to be trimmed or squared off when sewn together!  How cool is that!

So that's my WIP for today! I hope to have this quilt finished and photographed soon, for the new programme of classes being released next month!



Chilly Morning Inspiration

It's been a while so belated happy New Year to you all! Is it OK to say that? At least we are still in January!

So to kick-start the year I thought I would put together a little collage of recent work members of the Guild have done, as per Flickr.

So if in any case any of you needed motivation to start off with new new projects throw your eyes over these!

Don't forget to upload your work to the flickr group.  We'd also love to hear about what you are making this month, so contact Cindy (fluffysheepquilting(at)gmail(dot)com) if you are interested in writing a little WIP post for our guild blog.  

All the best 

Fi 
(patchworkdelights)