Lucky Me!

Last fall, my guild's president challenged members to work on six UFO's, one each month for six months. For every UFO that we completed and showed at guild meetings during those six months, we got one chance to win a prize at this month's meeting. I was the lucky winner of the prize -- five gorgeous fat quarters from The City Quilter, as well as a zipper pull/key chain glass bead ornament from Joyful Adornments by Bonnie.

I think I'm just going to admire these fabrics for a while before using them in a project.

Present For Me!

When I was organizing my fabric stash the other day, I got really depressed and told myself that I really need to stop buying fabric because I probably have enough to make 50 good-sized quilts! So, I decided to take advantage of my Barnes & Noble membership, plus a coupon and gift card to buy myself a new book.

Now all I have to do is stop looking through the book and make a quilt or two! (or fifty!)

Guest Speaker

My local quilt guild, the Mountain Laurel Quilt Guild, welcomed national quilting lecturer/teacher Gyleen Fitzgerald last week for a very informative program on "The Art of Color Blending".

Here she begins the lecture by showing her very first quilt -- three fabrics, three colors, all solids, same block repeated over and over.

Gyleen continued with the trunk show of the lovely quilts she made as she continued to grow as a quilt artist, using more color and more fabrics to make the quilts a lot more interesting. To paraphrase what she said, her goal was to "make the judges spend more time on my quilt so that they won't move on to yours".

You can see more photos of the trunk show and workshop from the following day on my guild's blog here.

Quilter in Space

I think my fellow scrap quilters will appreciate this.

OK, how do we get our hands on some discarded fabric from the International Space Station?

And Another May Finish

This one is not from my pre-2013 stash, so I won't add it to the total yardage used up, but it will be counted as a finished quilt for 2013.

I made this one after I once commented on my Facebook page that I was running out of friends, family, and charities to give my quilts to, and a friend/fellow quilter mentioned that she was making chemo quilts for the facility where the owner of our LQS was having her treatments. My friend said that my bright and cheery quilts are the type that work well for that, so I decided to get some fabric and whip one up. The front is flannel from Joann's (bought at a great price of $2.25/yard!) and the backing is fleece (again, bought at a great price after the winter). No batting, and just a large meander for the quilting.

The binding is made by bringing the backing to the front and then machine-stitching down with a zigzag stitch. I usually hate this method of attaching binding (I really prefer hand stitching it to the back), but it works for this because the fleece edge doesn't fray. I even managed to miter the corners.

The tutorial I used for the binding can be found on Vicki Welsh's blog here. And while you're visiting Vicki's blog, check out her gorgeous hand-dyed fabrics on Etsy.

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First May Finish

Finally, another quilt finished using my pre-2013-purchased fabric. This is one of my all-time favorite patterns from Mary (Mollie) Johnson of Maryquilts.com. It's such an easy quilt to make, but apparently, very impressive. I've made this quilt many times for gifts, and the mother of one of the recipients told me that she couldn't believe that someone could sew such straight seams! I accepted the compliment and didn't tell her that it's curved seams that drive quilters nuts!

Here's a closeup of the quilting...

And a view of the backing fabric....

That's another four yards of fabric used up in 2013 of pre-2013 fabric!