Category Archives: quilt guild

Guild Christmas Potluck

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Last Wednesday night was our quilt guild’s annual Christmas potluck.

The first three pictures are taken in the hall of all the ladies who attended this year.

I missed taking a picture of all the food. What a spread! Even though you tell yourself that you are only going to “taste” each dish, you still end up with a plate full of food. Quilting potlucks have the best food!
After dinner, we had a Christmas stocking show and tell. Any members who had made stockings brought them to share with the rest of us.

One of our members has been leading us in a mystery quilt. The project has been totally created by her and is proving to be a lot of fun. Those who having been playing along for the last three months brought their creations to share with the rest of us.

Even though everyone is working from the same directions with the same pattern, just changing the fabrics changes the look of the quilt.
We are also having a block of the month lotto. Each month we are given instructions to make a block. You bring your finished blocks to the next month’s meeting. At that meeting, a name is drawn from all the blocks contributed and the winner wins all the blocks. Each block you enter gives you an entry–the more blocks you make, the more chances you have to win. This month’s block is a string block foundation pieced onto used dryer sheets.

The last item on our agenda before the “meeting” part of the night is show and share (show and tell). This is the most popular part of our monthly meetings.

One of the guild members came up to me during the meeting and told me she has just discovered my blog. Hello, Ursula!

Quilting With Friends

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On March 1st, A total of 29 quilters came together to make donation quilts for our guild’s We Care program.

We quilted from 9:30 to 3:30. The We Care Committee was extremely organized–as always. When we arrived, tables and chairs were already set up for us. Once we picked our spot, we proceeded to the front of the room where there was a table with our names already printed out on tags. We picked up our name tag and our hostess checked us in on her list. We were able to choose one of two quilt patterns ahead of time and then the committee put together the corresponding number of kits.

I have to show you what the kits looked like. A zip lock back contained everything but the batting and label to make the quilt. Pre-cut batting and labels were available for each of us at the end of the day. Double click on the picture below to see the detailed labels that were on the pre-cut pieces in the kits. This was quilting for dummies–how could you go wrong–the borders, fabric A, fabric B, etc were all labeled with small pieces of paper pinned to the strips. The large dragon fly fabric was my backing.

There were two “model” quilts on display to help us visualize what our finished quilts would look like–this was the first one.

This was the second quilt.

Everyone was busy all day. This hall is a favorite location for our guild workshops as there is lots of light and lots of room.


We broke for lunch, but many ate their lunch and got right back to work. Everyone was enjoying themselves so much, they didn’t want to stop.


By the end of the day, most of the quilters finished their quilts to the flimsy stage and then received assistance from the committee in sandwiching their quilts. It makes it easier to finish the quilting process at home if your quilt is already sandwiched and prepared for quilting when you leave for the day.
This quilter had to leave early so she didn’t have a chance to get her borders on yet.

These are some of the other finished flimsies. The fabric combinations put together by the committee were wonderful.


What a great way to spend a Saturday–quilting with friends!

Quilt Guild – We Care Quilts

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Last Wednesday night was our regular monthly quilt guild meeting. We have an ongoing quilt charity program throughout the year where guild members make and donate quilts to our guild who in turn donates the quilts to local women’s shelters, local hospitals–both the cancer ward and maternity wards, RCMP Victim Services, and local Seniors’ homes to name just a few.

We had 29 quilts handed in on Wednesday evening. After the regular show and share portion of the evening, we have volunteers come forward and grab one of the We Care quilts donated that evening and stand side by side to show off the quilts to the rest of the membership. Our 29 quilts managed to circle the room completely. I was not able to get a picture of the group all at once, but i did wonder what the view would have been from the ceiling–looking down at that fabulous train of quilts that circled the room.







Crayons and Quilting

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Last Wednesday night was our monthly quilt guild meeting. We had a demonstration on colouring on fabric. I can see that this was a dangerous demonstration for me to watch, because I can feel the start of another project coming on. This is exactly how I get distracted from my focus on finishing my UFOs!

I came home and “Googled” crayons and quilting and came up with a lot of interesting information. There are many variations of colouring quilt blocks with crayons, but the link that I found that was most like the technique demonstrated to us on Wednesday night took me to the June 2003 (No. 353) issue of Quilter’s Newsletter Magazine: http://qnm.com/articles/feature44/

The article in QNM was written by Cheryl Wittmayer. If you visit Cheryl’s website, you will be even further tempted by the designs that can be created using this technique: http://sew-be-it.biz/crayon_patterns.html Cheryl says that the basics to the technique are:

Trace with a .01 black pigma pen.

Color with regular Crayola crayons—not fabric crayons.

Set the colors with your iron.

Color and set as many times as you need to get the depth of color you desire.

Stitch with a backstitch by hand, or free-motion machine stitch 4 times on the drawn lines, or triple-stitch by machine on the lines.

The only differences in Cheryl’s technique and the technique that was demonstrated to us at guild night were:

– Another method to trace your design from paper to fabric is to use ordinary carbon paper – simply put a piece of carbon paper between your design and your fabric and trace on the lines of your design. The design will be transferred to your fabric

– Another method to outline your design after you have finished colouring it if you don’t want to do embroidery by hand or machine is to use needle punch to outline your design. Our instructor suggested doing needle punch on the reverse side of the fabric that you normally do your needle punch on–you want the stitch line on the top of your design and the “puff” of the needle punch on the back.

I can envision the possibilities of this technique. In fact, this is an excellent project for those who consider themselves to not be appliquers. Any applique design would translate well to using this technique.

Quilt Guild Block Exchange – The Elements: Earth

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Our Quilt Guild has a new challenge–a block exchange. The theme of the block exchange is, “The Elements~Earth, Air, Fire, and Water”.

We were given this fabric as our inspiration.

This fabric is a small (only about 6″ square) piece of batik. The fabric is intended as our inspiration only and is not intended for use in the blocks.

We got together in groups of four. We were to make four 6 inch blocks each month for four months. The first month we were to make four blocks with the theme of, “Earth”. We exchanged the blocks with the other three members of our group last Wednesday at our guild meeting and went home with four different blocks that centered around the theme of, “Earth”~our own block plus a block from each of the other three members of our group.

One of my group members was unable to make it to the meeting so we have not finished exchanging blocks in my group. I will show you a picture of the other three blocks I received once we have completed the exchange. For now, I can show you my block.

I used the colours of the inspiration fabric to decide on the colour of my block and drew from the name of my block to satisfy the “Earth” element. My block is a paper pieced block called, Worlds Without End and is from Quilter’s Cache.

Once we are finished, we will have 16 blocks~all different~that we are to put together into a top and bring back to the last guild meeting of the year for show and tell. This is challenging, but fun all the same!