Whacky Ladies Auction Quilt

Yesterday was another sew-in day for the Whacky Ladies quilt bee.  Mission:  assemble the sampler quilt for the Heritage Days auction.  Once again, Betsy at Quilts Like Crazy right here in Wake Forest allowed us the use of their space to work on the quilt.

Here is Carolyn with one of the outer borders of 12-inch blocks.

That bear paw block on the right was left over from a quilt that I started back in 1987 or thereabouts and finished in 1998!

The ladies finished making the scrappy blue stripe border.  Here is Irene hard at work on the machine while Donna does some trimming.

Here is Sharon after trimming a last strip to fit.

Donna figured out how to sew the striped borders so that the stripes march around the center medallion.

It was fun to work together in such a colorful place with inspiring quilts everywhere you look.

By the time we "ran out of gas" at about 4:00, the white sashing was cut to size, and we decided to add a narrow flange of dark blue between the white border and the outer blocks.  I took it home to complete the final seams and then quilt it on my longarm.

Last night was the May meeting of the Capital Quilters Guild.  We are all abuzz because we are hosting the North Carolina Quilt Symposium in just two more weeks.  Last night we turned in our quilts for the show.  I am entering two quilts from last year.

Maggy Trees a Coon is entered in the Pictorial Quilt category.

Japanese Garden is entered in Wall Quilts, Small.

Last night I turned in three charity quilts for the Quilts on Wheels program.  I won a door prize- a green "honeybun" roll of fabric.

Our guild has a large stash of donated fabric.  Carolyn Ruby from Cyberbee, my group that has been in charged of Quilts on Wheels for the past two years, made lots of honeybuns and jellyrolls from the stash to serve as door prizes for those who make quilts for the charity.

We had a very entertaining and informative program about organizing your quilting space.  The speakers were two ladies from Kernersville, NC, who are now professional organizers.  I could relate to the "Before" pictures of the wreck of a sewing room. 

I did not take any photos at the meeting, but would like to direct your attention to My Sandbox to see the beautiful mystery quilt that Katie Greenwood finished just in time to turn in for the Symposium show.  So many pieces!  She did a fantastic job, and quilted this on a domestic sewing machine.

Leaving for the mountains today.  Some R&R at our mountain place, and a trip to Boone to check up on my dad, who is still in the nursing home trying to recover his strength after his hospitalization for pneumonia.

Work in Progress- Whacky Ladies Auction Quilt

All but one of the blocks are finished, the center medallion is a big glowing star, and some of the strip-pieced border is complete.  My local quilt bee, The Whacky Ladies, are making a sampler quilt to be auctioned at Heritage Days in October.  We were supposed to have a sew-in day to work on this project during the week that my father was in the hospital in Boone.  Since that day had to be cancelled, I decided to try to make some decisions about this project so we can proceed.

This morning I  moved the furniture, mopped my kitchen floor (gasp) , and started playing with settings.

My first idea was to surround the center star with the 12-inch blocks, and finish with the scrappy strip border.

That was looking kind of busy.  Next up was to add a white border around the center medallion.

That seemed a little unbalanced...too heavy on the outside edges.

Then I tried putting the scrappy stripes around the center medallion, and the pieced blocks on the outside.

I think this will be the setting we use.  The finished quilt will be 72" square.  I think a few are going to work on this at our local quilt shop, Quilts Like Crazy, on Thursday.  I will quilt it, and others will do the binding.  It should be ready in plenty of time to be displayed at the July meeting of the Capital Quilters Guild.

Two-Color Quilt Contest

If you ever visit the Quilting Gallery, you may have seen some of the weekly contests they have been sponsoring. This week's theme is Two-Color Quilts. I decided to enter the quilt on our bed, a blue-and -white sampler.

The large blocks are from an Internet block swap back in the nineties. It took me years to figure out how to set these. I ended up floating them in wide expanses of white, and adding blue stars and rectangles to the outer borders. It was one of the first big quilts that I finished on my Gammill Classic. I spent a long time quilting designs in the white areas and custom-quilting each block. After washing, all those pretty feathers and motifs just kind of drew up into old-fashioned looking soft quilting. It is soft as a cloud!

The funny thing about this quilt is that as N.C.State fans and UNC enemies, Carolina Blue is not the color scheme of choice at our house. I dealt with this little problem by adding the NCSU Wolf mascot in the window of the house block, and naming this quilt Go Wolfpack!

This quilt is big enough to drape across the top of our king-size bed, and blends nicely with the soft tones of this lovely mural-sized painting that my father created for our kitchen dining nook in Cary. I guess serenity was the goal with seven kids crowded around the kitchen table. I got to take this painting home when my father sold the family home and moved to an apartment back in 2005.

Voting for the two-color quilt contest begins Friday morning on the Quilting Gallery Blog.