Lincoln MQG 2018 QuiltCon Charity Quilt

I couldn't be more proud of my guild mates from the Lincoln MQG. While the design was mine, so many of my fellow members gave input and hard work in making my vision come to life. There will be an official post on our blog, but I just had to share it here. Because I live an hour away from where our meetings are held, I have not seen the quilt since it's completion and am looking forward to touching it.

Whats new!

So, the Lincoln Modern Quilt Guild had a really fun challenge this last month. It was called That's Modern and each member drew a card from a bag with an element of modern quilting on it, such as improvisation or minimal. I got bold and graphic. We were to make a 16" finished piece with black, white and one other color in solids. It was so fun to see all the different interpretations of each prompt. Here is what I came up with

Also, from our last show and tell, I made these cute little mid century houses.

Challenges..

I took part in a group improv challenge and it was such fun. The challenge was to use scraps and orphan blocks ( ones left over or never finished) and create an improvisational piece from a picture.

So, I had found this picture of a nice little mid century credenza, but really loved the art sitting on it more.

It was the perfect starting point for me. So I went thru my orphaned things looking for blues and greys and lights that would work well. Then I hit the scrap drawers and pulled more fabrics

I had some nice things in the orphan pile like some cyan prints done at a LMQG class and some other piecing left over or not used.

So, off it went to play, and here is the result.

I call this piece Metro and it reminds me of San Francisco, where I grew up. 

The moral of this post..challenge yourself..you will usually be pleasantly surprised with the results.

Why, why, why!?

There has been an uproar over a Facebook group called Worldwide Quilting Group. I did not belong to it, which after reading about what has happened, I am very glad I didn't. It appears the administrator of the group has been stealing other creators free content, editing it and re-posting it as a PDF file and taking credit for its creation. How rude. Then, when they were called out for it, said "opps, sorry I didn't know",  and immediately kicked and blocked the creator of said content, and anyone else who voiced their outrage at what she had done. 

The woman had the gaul to say she didn't know it was wrong. How could you NOT know that copy / pasting a tutorial, going through it page by page removing any mention of the original creators name and website, and repackaging it into a PDF available for download was not WRONG!!

Was it so important for this woman to garner praise and worship from other quilters, to boost her own ego, that she outright stole another quilters work and tried to pass it off as her own?

The group is now a "private" group and the thief and her cronies will dump/block anyone who brings this incident up. As far as anyone knows the content is still up on this group and available for more thieves to steal.

A great article was written over at Hunters Design Studio as to why this is so, so wrong. Please go read and educate yourself on how to not steal another persons hard work.

Greenery

I decided to enter a challenge, the Pantone 2017 Quilt Challenge using the color "Greenery" All the self doubts come out that its not good enough, green enough, interesting enough but I'm doing it anyway. So, here is my quilt top only. It measures W-33.5 x L-45.5

Getting things done

Since I returned from Quiltcon, I have been in a wonderful sewing mood. I have finished several items and made some new. The first item shown is a top I call 3D20. It is the result of a challenge from the Facebook group, Improve Handbook for Modern Quilters. Each month the group comes up with it's own score ( ala Sherri Lynn Woods ) and we go for it.

I took a piece I made a little over a year ago when I first got Sherri's book. I was attempting the strip sets score and pulled leftover strips from my scraps and made a very dismal piece. I was not very happy with it at all. Then came these challenges and the second one was to take orphan blocks, leftovers or even a full piece and cut it up and remake it using only scraps you had on hand. You were allowed to purchase 2 additional fabrics but solids only.

The result is 3D20 and I love this piece. Not only the reworking of something I didn't like into something cheerful and happy, I love that it brought me back to fun days with friends.

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This next item now has a name, Rogue One, due to a comment made on Facebook about the "little rogue diagonal piece". This is the final result of a class I took at Quiltcon Savannah from Heather Jones called Improvisational Line and Design. Loved the class and loved the technique. I want to try it again but with larger strips ( these are between 1" and 2-1/2" ) resulting in 4-1/2" blocks, 16 of which make up one "block". Heather told us how she had done a larger scale piece with 20" blocks of which there were only 4. I also was to do more striking color combo's. While I like this softer palette, I want to go a teeny bit crazy on the next one.

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This little guy was an orphan. I had an idea for a piece and got this much done and the plan was to add a small silhouette of a bird in red standing on one of the grasses I was going to call the piece Sentinels. I had seen this while driving along the highway in Northern California. Well I couldn't get the bird to look just right so I set it aside. Guess that was a good idea because my chapter of the Modern Quilt Guild has approached the Int'l Quilt Study Center and Museum for a small show of modern quilts and the president of the guild asked if I had anything minimal. I showed her two pieces and she choose this one so I quilted it up and got it ready. I really like the finished product. The piece is still going to be titled Sentinels.

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On National Quilt Day, I was sewing selvages together at the local celebration and it got me to thinking about all the selvages I had saved and so I took a look at what I had and made this bag. Just for fun!

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I was also able to do a challenge piece for the LMQG this month on Curves!

National Quilting Day

So, March 18th was National Quilting Day and my chapter of the Modern Quilt Guild sponsored an event at the International Quilt Study Center and Museum in Lincoln Nebraska. The theme was Upcycling, a new term coined for reusing cloth items to make new items instead of dumping them or donating them. 

"Upcycling, also known as creative reuse, is the process of transforming by-products, waste materials, useless, or unwanted products into new materials or products of better quality or for better environmental value"

I volunteered in the Upcycling room, where we displayed several items made with upcycled items, where I sewed selvages together.

Many of you know a selvage is the edge of a piece of fabric that most of us would clip away and toss. In recent years, these have been cut, sometimes up to 2 inches wide, and saved.

With the addition of more modern prints on the market, these selvages have become bright and cheery and when sewn together in strips make a sturdy fabric with a huge range of uses such as pillows, pot holders, bags and even full size quilts.

Now there are several ways you can sew them together. As I said earlier, I like to cut a wider swath, about 2 inches. This allows me the choice to sew the strips close together, showing just the selvage edge, or to separate them a bit allowing the fabric print to show through and creating a wider stripe. 

You can also sew them down to create a kind of ruffle effect that is quite pretty.

You can sew them onto a piece of muslin or scrap fabric as in foundation piecing or just sew them directly on to each other. There are just so many uses for what used to be toss away fabric.