Doing Good Stitches

(click on photo to enlarge)

April is National Volunteer Month, so I spent this past Saturday working on some charity HST (half-square triangle) quilts with fellow guild members. Check out my guild's blog (click here) to see more photos. We all had a great time playing with the infinite number of layouts that are possible with HST's.

Many Hands Make Light Work

My guild's charity sewing group met yesterday and we quickly whipped up this fun top that will eventually be a quilt that goes to our current outreach project, quilts for the local foster child program. Just a simple disappearing nine-patch pattern with fun boy-friendly novelty fabrics. The fabrics were cut into six-inch squares, so the top is approximately 48 inches by 64 inches, a great size for an older boy.

Now What?

Some of my regular readers might recognize these twelve blocks from a Modern Block-of-the-Month that I participated in a year or so ago (started in Aug 2011, finished in July 2012). I've had these on my design wall for quite a while now, hoping that something will inspire me to figure out a layout, but so far, nothing has come to me. Truthfully, I haven't really thought about it much because I have way too many other things keeping me occupied, and unfortunately, not all of them are quilting-related.

Anyway,  I'll figure this out someday, but in the meantime, I don't need my design wall for anything else, so they'll just stay up there.

I'm thinking perhaps some solid gray fabric to tie it all together...

Fabric and Wine

A good friend of mine is having a birthday, so I whipped up this wine bottle gift bag and finished it with my hand-dandy easy-peasy method of making the rounded bottom...

This project only used up one-eighth of a yard of fabric from my stash, but every little bit counts!

Small Things

I'm afraid I won't be using up too much of my stash this month -- I've mainly been busy with spring cleaning (yuck) and there are a couple of small quilting projects with deadlines that need my attention. One is due on May 1st and what you see in the photo are the supplies I hope to use. I have a plan, but no guarantee that the plan will work...

Giveaway Winner

OK, today was the day for the drawing for the Jennifer Chiaverini book and Elm Creek Quilts pins. I used the very scientific method of choosing a winner -- the blog post had 22 comments, so I asked my husband to pick a number between 1 and 22 and he chose 12. That's Sallie.

I asked everyone to tell me where they are from and what kinds of quilting charity projects they work on. Here's what Sallie wrote --"I'm from Texas and enjoy making baby quilts for our church quilt ministry that sends them to foreign orphanages or gives them to the local pregnancy help center."

I was thrilled to read about everyone's charity projects -- quilters are an amazing bunch. Thank you all for being such generous, giving people. I wish I had enough copies of the book to give one to all of you -- you all deserve it!

Sallie -- I've emailed you and asked for your mailing address. Congratulations!

Starry-Eyed

I'm a member of the Ithaca Modern Quilt Guild and several months ago we were given a challenge to create a group version of Van Gogh's A Starry Night as a quilt. Those who wanted to participate were given a square from a poster of the painting and then asked to recreate that square in fabric/fiber. This past Sunday, we all met and showed off our squares. What you see above is how they look on the design wall (the 24th will be finished soon), before being trimmed and sewn together.

We were all amazed at how good all of our pieces looked together, even with all sorts of techniques being used -- fabric painting, thread painting, fusing, patchwork, yarn couching, etc.

 Here's what the poster looked like...

Here are closeup shots of some of the individual blocks...(click on the photos to see larger views)...

Now the blocks will be sewn together and quilted with stitching in the ditch. We hope to display the final project sometime later this year at a First Friday Gallery Night in Ithaca in Quilters Corner (the great shop where we hold our meetings).

Great fun!