Today was Canada Day. I was able to spend some time in the studio finishing The Family of Three to the flimsy stage.
Family of Three – finished flimsy
This top finishes as 41″ x 53″. Quilting is next!
Family of Three – Finished Flimsy
Reply
Category Archives: Canada 150
FVQG Quilt Show – June 24, 2017 and Happy 150th Birthday Canada!
I attended the Fraser Valley Quilters’ Guild quilt show last weekend. The name of their show was, Patchwork Nation and featured many Canadian themed quilts. Since today is Canada’s 150th birthday it seems appropriate to feature some of the quilts from that show.
The decor outside of the show definitely gave you a hint as to the theme of many of the quilts inside.
The challenge quilts were fabulous! Every quilter had to use the colour red in their project and one other colour that was drawn at random from a paper bag. You can see the mandatory colours that were used in each quilt on a piece of paper next to each quilt.
The following images were of quilts that centered around the Canadian theme. 
These two fabulous quilts were part of the Premie Quilt donation program that the guild supports. This guild donates on average 500 quilts to the NICU (Natal Intensive Care Unit) at Women’s Hospital.
Every time I hear the story around this quilt it makes me smile. This quilt is by Val Smith and is called, Does It Come In Other Colours?
There was also a bed turning which featured quilts from Canada over the last 150 years. This quilt was from our Centennial in 1967 and featured the symbol of Canada’s Centennial in the border. 1967 was also the year that Montreal hosted EXPO.
This vintage quilt was from 1967 and featured the crests and flowers from each province. The designs were drawn on fabric and then coloured with liquid embroidery. I remember the tubes of Artex paint that my mother used to have. 🙂
This is another Canadian Centennial quilt that was painted with Artex. This quilt won first prize at the PNE in Vancouver in 1967.
Canada’s Big Quilt Bee
To celebrate Canada’s 150th birthday, the Canadian Quilting Association is inviting quilters to be part of Canada’s biggest Quilt Bee.
The Big Quilt Bee will be held June 14-17, 2017 at Quilt Canada 2017 in Toronto, Ontario. There will be sewing machines, long arms, mid arms and an army of volunteers ready to work on quilt tops and stacks of slab blocks that have been made and sent in by hundreds of Canadian quilters.
The goal is to make and donate 1,000 quilts for kids at Ronald McDonald Houses across Canada.
The blocks that are making up the quilts are 12.5″ slab blocks incorporating at least one piece of special Canada fabric that has been printed this year in honour of Canada’s 150th birthday. Slab blocks were made famous when Cheryl Arkison used ‘slab’ blocks in quilts for families who lost everything in the Alberta floods in 2013. Now, with Cheryl’s permission, Canadian quilters are once again making slab blocks for a worthy cause.
Instructions on how to make slab blocks:
Quilting-Bee-How-to-make-a-block
This is a piece of one of the special Canada 150 fabrics that can be used in these blocks.
On January 21, 2017, the local university donated classroom space to our guild so that we could dedicate a day to making slab blocks and assembling quilt tops.
The room was a bee hive of quilters cutting, sewing, and pressing their scraps together into colourful blocks.
By the end of the day we had a handful of completed tops and stacks of completed blocks. 
I took my slab blocks home and completed two quilts.
Canada 150 Slab Quilt – red and blue
Canada 150 Slab Quilt close up
Canada 150 Slab Quilt – green and purple
Canada 150 Slab Quilt closeup
Last night at our guild meeting, everyone brought the quilts that they had finished to date for a group picture. The Canadian Quilting Association is eager to hear how everyone is doing and anxious for us to report in as they are keeping a tally of the number of completed quilts towards the 1,000 finished quilt goal.