BIQR: What I Made...

As I mentioned in the previous post, Gwen did several demos on how to make the various elements in her "37 Sketches".  Above, she is showing us how to insert a curved line into a piece of fabric. Gwen does all her sewing on a Featherweight.

You can see my version of the curved line in this picture. It was not that hard! Most of the strips for the parts of this sketch were cut at 3/4" wide so that only a 1/4 inch showed when the peices were all sewn together. I have never used such skinny strips before!  On most of Gwen's sketches, she added at least one print fabric--you can see my green and yellow print fabric above. I considered my first "sketch" to be my chance to make at least one of each of the elements she taught us. It is not exactly "artistic" but I learned a lot making this first little quilt.

At the lower right, you can see my (mostly successful) attempts to insert pointy bits into the stripey element.

Gwen did several demos on how to do this ...

This is Christine's first sketch--She used some neat owl fabric in one of the trees--click on the picture to see their little faces!

My second sketch used some new birch tree fabric that I purchased at one of the local quilt stores. Once the other quilters saw this fabric, there was a mad dash to the quilt store and it was soon sold out! There is a black binding on this sketch--the gallery wall for all of the completed projects was black so the binding did not show up in my picture.

If you have been reading my blog for a while, you might remember these little liberated fruit and vegetable baskets and "FRESH" letters that I made at Quilt Til You Wilt in February. I had put them away after that day, not really knowing what to do with them. I brought them along to the BIQR and with some guidance and ideas from Gwen, I put them together, added some more words "U-Pick" and a liberated churn dash block and voila, a completed wall hanging flimsy!

Now, I will have to decide if I want to add a border or just quilt and bind it... What do you think?

This black and white sketch with some green and red touches was made for my husband. In this one, I made some liberated log cabin blocks and some liberated 9-patches.

For my last project, I made some 4" basket blocks from these fabrics purchased at one of the local quilt stores.

I made 16 baskets and hope to make lots more!

We sewed all day from about 9am to midnight most days, except for our field trips into town to go to the quilt stores and the orchard for apples.

Christine worked on a quilt for her daughter, made one more sketch with more owls in it, and finished sewing her 30's spin blocks together.

Here's an Elk Lake sunset to close off this post.  In my next post, I will show some of the sketches made by the other quilters at the retreat.