The Modern Wedge --workshop with Kathy Doughty

My friend, Debbie, and I had a wonderful day in Brantford last week at a workshop organized by the Red Red Bobbin quilt shop. I had read about the workshop on Nancy's blog a few months ago and immediately signed up and invited Debbie to join me. Kathy Doughty, of Material Obsession fame, has been travelling all over the US and made one stop in Canada to do three days of workshops at the Red Red Bobbin. Kathy's husband, John, joined her on her trip--he loves to travel and is a wonderful photographer, quilt holder, suitcase lugger and supporter of Kathy! He even helped some of the participants in with their machines, bags and bins of fabric! Here is a picture of Kathy talking about one of her quilts--that is John holding the quilt.

Kathy and John live in Australia and the twenty ladies taking the class were thrilled to see several of her quilts from her recent books--Adding Layers and Making Quilts. 

The theme of our workshop was the Modern Wedge and Kathy showed us several examples of what can be done with a wedge ruler and some imagination!

Fussy cutting the fabrics can lead to some fun circles!

This one is called vintage spin.

This one is made by sewing strips together before cutting the wedges.

This is an example of a pieced background for some appliqued circles made from wedges. (John the quilt holder's feet are at the bottom of the quilt!)

The circles can be layered on top of each other for a fun effect.

(Those are my feet this time...)

How about points at both ends of the wedges???

I started by sorting my fabrics into two piles--warm colours and cool colours.

I chose these two fabrics to start and cut out a few wedges and started playing on the design wall. Note how the red recedes and the green fabric comes forward!

My circle told me it wanted to go into a different direction.

Kathy suggested cutting out some shorter wedges in two darker fabrics so that that my next "worm" would recede more than the first one.

Then, two lighter colours in longer wedges were added...I like where this is going!  Kathy and I discussed background fabric ideas...She asked me if I have any dark fabrics in my stash???  Silly question, I told her!  I would like to try making a pieced background and will work on this over the summer so I can put this quilt into the London Friendship Quilters' Guild show this fall.

Debbie made several circles on her design wall and is well on her way to a beautiful quilt!

 

Thank you, Kathy, for a wonderful, fun and inspiring day!  We hope to see you again sometime.

I did some gardening on the weekend...

 

 

 

I'm still here

 



I'm still alive. I have not been doing any sewing for the last few weeks as I have had a family member in the hospital. He is home today and on the road to recovery so life may finally settle down a bit.

The slabs in this quilt were made by members of the Elgin Piecemakers Guild and I put them together in to a flimsy about 3 weeks ago. My husband held it up for me to take pictures last week on a sunny but breezy day...

It was hard to get a picture!

Cathy called tonight to let me know that my Scrappy Mountain Majesties quilt is done so now I just have to do the binding.  I have a round robin quilt to pass off to her so hopefully we can get together soon to trade parcels!

My daughter was home this past weekend and was snooping around in my fabric ...she found a kit I purchased recently at Greenwood Quiltery in Guelph to make an infinity scarf for her.  While she and her Dad played basketball in the driveway, I made the infinity scarf.  Here she is modelling it...

The garden is coming alive with flowers and many weeds...I managed to pull a few weeds on the weekend for 30 minutes or so but it still needs more work. I just don't have time right now.  In the meantime, I will focus on the flowers and ignore the weeds....

This magnolia tree is in my MIL's yard.

Progress and some more charity quilts.

I have been working away at several different projects this week, trying to tie up some loose ends and meet all of my upcoming deadlines.  I am not sure it is ever possible to "catch up" but I sure am going to try!

I put my scrappy mountain majesties blocks together this week and added two borders.  The top is now done.  I have purchased some backing and will be getting this quilt off to the quilters this week. My goal is to get the backing pieced and the label made this week sometime.

We had a meeting of the Elgin Piecemakers this past week. Here is a picture of all of our red, black and white blocks for this month's charity quilt.

One person was not able to make it to our meeting so her block will be added to that blank spot later.  These blocks will make a wonderful quilt.

This quilt has been quilted and just needs binding. It will be ready for delivery soon.

  There were six completed quilts that will be taken to the hospital adult chemo unit this week.

Today, I have been working on a round robin quilt. 3 friends and I are participating. I have already put a border on one person's quilt and this one is round 2. We will exchange again in early May for the last round.  We hope to get together for lunch to give the quilt tops back to their original owners.  We each supplied the middle block and the fabric for the rest of the quilt, although, everyone said that we could add our own fabric to each project.  No pictures allowed until the grand reveal.

I did the binding on another kid's charity quilt for the London Friendship Quilters' Guild this week. This is another group project with Nancy piecing the top and back, me supplying the batting and doing the binding and Cathy did the long arm quilting.

I walked around my backyard today and took a few pictures of the flowers that are in bloom!

These are mini daffodils.

Beautiful pasque flowers--I love the fuzzy stems.

A water drop in some unfurling columbine leaves.

My stash report for this week...  I purchased some fabric for a workshop that I will be taking later in May. I needed 1/2 yards and my stash consists mostly of fat quarters.  I also purchased backing fabric for the quilt at the top of this post.

Fabric used since my last stash report: 4.2 yards
Total fabric used this year: 53.85 yards
Fabric added to the stash since my last report: 10.5 yards
Total fabric added this year: 54.65 yards
Net fabric added this year: 0.8 yards

Until next time...

This week's projects...

Last week, I cut out 32 light squares and 32 medium to dark squares and made these half square triangles--64 in total.

I started making Scrappy Mountain Majesties blocks earlier this week. This is a free Bonnie Hunter pattern.

Yesterday afternoon, I spent a couple of hours at the sewing machine and made some more blocks:

I really like this arrangement of the blocks!  Lots to look at in these fabrics--flowers, barn-board, fall leaves...

By the time I went to bed last night, this is what my design wall looked like...can you see the green bean fabric?  My daughter's favourite vegetable is green beans!  The sunflower fabric is leftover from a dress I made for her when she was 10 years old.

Tonight, I finished off the rest of the blocks:

This week, I will get these blocks put together and add a couple of borders. Now that I look at the picture, I see a couple of blocks I would like to move around.

I also did some hand sewing this week:

The blocks for this quilt were made by Nancy at Life is a Stitch. I assembled the top from Nancy's blocks and pieced some batting. I found some purple fabric deep in my stash that I used as backing and binding.  Cathy at Eagle's Wings Quilts quilted the quilt and I did the binding. This quilt will be donated to the London Friendship Quilters' Guild charity quilt committee for a child in foster care.  Someone is sure to love the cats in the spinning four patch blocks!

Can you see them?

 

These cats are winking at you!

 

Nice job on the swirly quilting, Cathy!

 

 

 

I have not done a stash report in ages.  As you know, I have made some purchases recently. Pam from Mad About Patchwork was the vendor at our most recent London Friendship Quilters' Guild meeting and it is futile to resist her fabrics!

 

 

 Fabric used since my last stash report: 7.3 yards

Total fabric used this year: 49.65 yards
Fabric added to the stash since my last report: 19.5 yards
Total fabric added this year: 44.15 yards
Net fabric used this year: 5.5 yards

 

 

The good news...I am still in the black and I have a couple of backings to piece soon! This should help the numbers for my next stash report.

 

 

Have a good week. Happy Easter!

Stitch and Flip Workshop with Jacquie Gering

Jacquie Gering of Tall Grass Prairie Quilts fame was our guest speaker and workshop leader this past week at the London Friendship Quilters' Guild. You can see pictures of Jacquie's trunk show at the guild blog here. My post is going to concentrate on the wonderful stitch and flip workshop that I attended yesterday.

 

Jacquie started with a talk about how to make a stitch and flip unit.  She showed us several types of units and showed us examples of how they can be used to make various shapes and direction changes when putting the units together to create an infinite variety of designs.

 

 

During the workshop, Amalia came up with another type of stitch and flip unit that Jacquie called the "Amalia's Adjacent". You can see 4 of these units in the green star in the middle of Amalia's project.

 

 

This is Jacquie's design wall where she showed us examples of what we could make with the various units.

 

This quilt was made with stitch and flip rectangles instead of squares!

 

I started by cutting lots of 3.5" squares and green and yellow triangles.  I chain pieced lots of units and then started playing with them on my design wall.

 

 

First, I made a yellow flower with a long stem.

Next, an orange flower...

 

 

Then, my design wall fell down and all my pieces fell on the floor in a pile...it was not pretty!  I got them back up on the wall and got my pins out to pin them to the design wall so would not be in disarray again!

This little star is made with 1.5" squares and finishes at 3.5".  It became the centre of my next flower.

A star within a star!  Gwen Marston calls these liberated stars.

(You can see the pins holding everything up in this picture!)  I also started playing with curving the stems.

Every so often, I wandered around the room to see what everyone else was up to.  Lots of inspiration everywhere!  This is Carol arranging her units at the beginning of her project. You can see more at her blog here.

Jacquie also talked to us about how she quilts her pieces.

She often uses different coloured threads--in this case, a lighter gray on the horizontal and a darker gray on the diagonal (in this picture).

Here, purple threads for a few rows of stitching and then turquoise...

I really liked this one! She also explained how to do matchstick quilting which is straight lines about 1/8" apart (or closer).

Jacquie was kept busy all day, going from design wall to design wall, helping us all to make the most of our creativity and helping us to think through the challenges and fun of putting these units together. She had lots of energy and we all laughed a lot as we learned from her and each other.

Thanks for a great day, Jacquie!