Wool Applique Project done!

Tonight was the February meeting of the Elgin Piecemakers Quilt Guild. I worked hard all week to finish my wool applique project so that I could bring it to the meeting for show and tell.  Ta Da!  Here it is. I tried to position the light so the texture of my hand quilting would show up in this picture.

Quilting with black thread on black material is hard, but not impossible as long as I have good lighting and my reading glasses on...

The colour is a bit better in this picture.  The sign to my right says "Quilters live Pieceful Lives".  The toy sewing machines belong to Jacqui--the meeting was at her house tonight.

Of course, everyone brought in a block for this month's chemo quilt...the colours were brown, tan/cream and green this month. Sorry about the funny angle on the picture!

For January, we made red and white heart blocks and that quilt top is now done and ready for quilting:

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I am hoping to finish putting together my Improvisational Piecing project from last summer's Jacquie Gering project next.  I just have 3 more seams and then it will be ready for quilting.  It is so nice to be finishing off these workshop UFO's!

 

At long last, a SEWING DAY!!!

The Elgin Piecemakers got together today for our annual winter sewing day.  I have not had my sewing machine out in two weeks...yikes! I packed up everything I needed for the day last night so I could just load the car and go this morning. I started out by making three charity quilt blocks for our chemo quilts.  The brown, green and tan block above will be handed in this Thursday at our February meeting.  I also made a black slab block:

I made this block 12.5" square and was reminded by another member of the guild at the end of the day that it was supposed to be a 15.5" square so I will have to add some more strips to this block to bring it up to the right size.

 

 

I also made a block from my collection of 30's prints.  This is my own design.  No pattern used! 

 

After the three blocks were done, I pieced a couple of flannel backs for our charity quilts.  We had some flannel leftover from previous quilts that I brought home from the last meeting, hoping to be able to piece two or three backs from them. There is still more fabric left and I will check my flannel stash to see if there is anything I can add to make a third pieced back.  Sorry, there are no pictures of the flannel backings.

 

After lunch, I dug out my improvisational piecing project from a Jacquie Gering workshop last summer at Quilts at the Creek.  I laid my blocks out on the floor in a taped grid, as suggested by Jacquie.

 

 



I ended up making one more block before putting everything together.  I still had a couple of seams to finish off by the end of the day but you will get the idea by looking at the picture below.

I moved some things around as I sewed this together. I will likely quilt this myself and may try using some variegated thread that I have in my stash.

For Slow Sunday Stitching tomorrow, I hope to finish off the hand quilting on my wool applique wall hanging. I am using black thread on black material to add some texture to this little project.  I started this one at a workshop over a year ago...

Just in case you are getting worried that I won't have anything to sew once these ufo's are done, I have at least three more workshop ufo's to finish as well as other projects floating around in my mind waiting to be made.  Until next time... Happy Sewing!

Machine quilting and Hand binding.

I spent some time this week machine quilting the Down on the Farm baby quilt.  Organic quilting is quite easy when I use my walking foot...I was about half way done when I realized I had forgotten to put the walking foot on my machine.  I had really been struggling with the quilting and could not figure out why it was so hard!  It went much better once I changed to the proper foot!!!

I think that chicken fabric is my favourite!

I used three different colours of thread for this quilt. The centre section is quilted with orange. I used green thread on the right third and blue thread on the left third.  (I need to buy more orange thread!)

 

I had some black and white stripes for the binding.

I made the binding and machine sewed it on last night (with my walking foot!).

I got about half way around the quilt with the hand sewing part and hope to finish it off today. 

As you can see, the backing is bright orange. I inserted some leftover fabric into the backing to make it interesting. I will show the completed quilt in a future post.

Christine bought me this fan/Frisbee!  Don't you all agree???

I went for a walk outside yesterday and took this picture.

Happy Slow Sunday Stitching!