Mid-October was a perfect time for the Fall Material Girls Retreat, hosted by Shirley from The Marsh Store in Coldstream and Joan from Sew Creative in Mt. Brydges. The hotel ballroom was packed with quilters and their projects, cutting tables, pressing stations, a design wall, lots of coffee, laughter, friendship and inspiration.
I think I took only about half what I did last time, which was still a few projects too many :) But I did have lots of great progress.
One of our recent London Modern Quilt Guild meetings was a lesson on "big blocks" and the first project was big half rectangle triangles (excellent tutorial here). This was created from a fat quarter collection acquired a bunch of years ago, called "Melon Patch". I purchased this *way* before I ever got to know Kristyn, the amazing quilter known as "Melon Patch Quilts". Life is funny, eh?
This quilt is the perfect size for my MIL's smaller bed at the long-term care facility, and was delivered today, with extra hugs.
Some closer-up photos of the quilting fun I had with this. The diagonals with the plainer yellow has a variety of freehand quilting designs, and the diagonals with the Melon Patch fabrics have arcs using Linda Hrcka's Quilted Pineapple's rulers.
 |
| a bit of the quilting |
 |
| the label from the fat quarter collection - "Melon Patch"! |
 |
| This is the stitch counter on my new Bernina Q24. Up and running since August 2017, this shows 1.6+ million stitches so far :) Love every one of those beautiful stitches! |
Funny story. I purchased a beautiful little charm pack at QuiltX in the spring, and the teal and snow background colours, to make a cute little lap quilt with just easy-peasy squares and sashing. So there I was, happily visiting and chatting and stitching. Not paying much attention. As you do. Stitching the sashing to each square. Stitching another sashing to the other side of the square.
Getting ready to stitch the corner stones and sashing combo for the top/bottom of each square. Those of you who quilt, realize what I've done. Because what I've done is *not* what you do for the design I was working on. Sheesh. You *don't* attach sashing to *both* sides of each square, only one side.
Hmmm. So in this self-imposed design opportunity, I carried on bravely and put some white between each nicely sashed-on-both-sides square and put those into rows and put a row of white between each row. Looks rather like a filmstrip? Kind of charming.
The real reason I picked up this project was to do the digital design - a beautiful diagonal plaid.
This digital pantograph is one I purchased from Digi-tech, designed and digitized by Patricia Ritter. It works wonderfully! I'll have to get another closer-up photo.
Part of this year's festivities at the retreat was a Mystery Project. We were provided with yardage suggestions prior to the retreat. The estimate for this project is a couple of hours. Seven hours and lots of laughs later, we had finished table runners! And apparently I reversed the fabrics for the main block sashing (yellow) and the middle border (light teal), but I do really like it!
This was a perfect little project to do some fun continuous curve quilting on the main blocks. The outer edges are bead board / piano keys. The batting on this one is Hobbs 80/20 which gave the quilting nice definition.
Decided this would be a great sample - Joan has this on display in her shop in Mt Brydges - Sew Creative.
