Quilt 'til You Wilt

Yesterday was our annual Quilt 'til You Wilt day with the London Friendship Quilters Guild.  I packed up my sewing machine, supplies and projects on Friday night and my husband helped me to load the car at 8am on Saturday morning.  I was among the first to arrive and got a table for four near the ironing station. By the time I set up my machine, Cathy arrived, coffee in hand. A little while later, Christine and Karen showed up. We all had a great day, chatting and sewing and admiring all of the sewing going on in the room.

Christine finished up the last few blocks for a quilt she is making for her daughter and by the end of the day, the quilt top was finished, except for the final border! She used her 1951 featherweight.

Karen stayed up late the night before pin basting a pile of table runners that she had pieced and spent the day quilting them and adding binding. I see lots of hand stitching in her near future!

Cathy was working on an I Spy quilt for her grand-daughter and had the entire middle of the quilt done by the time she went home late afternoon.  She will add the borders and get it quilted in the next week or so.

I worked on a comfort quilt block for the Elgin Piecemakers to get me warmed up. February's colours are lime green and yellow with white--I needed to make a star block.  I found this pattern on the internet.  There was some math involved as the pattern was for a 6.5" block and my block is 12.5"

Next, I worked on a project I have been wanting to do for years...A new Christmas tree skirt.  My old one is over 30 years old and looks like it was made in the 80's, which it was.  I saw some pictures on the internet of a tree skirt made with 60 degree 8" triangles that I liked.  Most of the fabrics that I had been collecting for this project were fat quarters so I decided I would use 4" triangles instead.  What I did not realize at the time was I would need 360 triangles to make my skirt.  I spent one evening cutting triangles this past week when Christine was over to sew.

I used my table to lay out all of the triangles for each section before I started to sew.

You can see the piles of triangles for each section at the top of the picture above.  I divided up all of the fabrics evenly so the whole thing will look balanced in the end.

Here is the first section, all sewn together.  The skirt will be a large hexagon and the long side on the right being the outer edge.  The narrow part on the left will be near the tree.  I am making a large hole in the middle to accommodate the tree stand.

Here are sections 1 and 2, sewn together.

By the end of the day, I had three sections done. --Half of the tree skirt.

I will work away on sewing more sections this week as time allows.  I would like to have it done by two weeks from now when we put up our tree.  I will be using the same red and white striped binding as I used on my Christmas quilt.

Just before I went home for the day, I made three string blocks for January's comfort quilt for the Elgin Piecemakers.  This fabric was donated to our guild and two of our members cut it into strips and gave us muslin foundations to use.  The only instructions were to put the yellow strip down the middle diagonally for each block.

Today, it is time to slow down and do some counted cross stitch with the other Slow Sunday Stitchers at Kathy's blog.    I am adding outline stitches to this snowman's hat and scarf today and would like to  finish him off including the birds and sticks as well.