January 2014

 The 3rd Thursday of the month came up quick!  We had a few show and tells this month, so let's get started!

Yvonne made a valance and table runner for her home.  She hand quilted them!  Sorry for the blurry picture!

 Haley is making her daughter an Alien quilt.  Isn't it cute?!

 Jana made a lap quilt out of flannel.  It is the 10 minute block that we have now made several times with our charity quilts.  I hadn't noticed how much it looks like a Bow-tie block until it was on the design wall.

 

I also made a quilt for my son for Christmas out of flannel that had been in my stash.  Used the large twister ruler to make it.

 

And I have had this quilt kit for years and never got around to making it.  I finally had time at a quilt retreat to get going on it.  The pattern is from Geralyn Powers.

 

Janice demoed a new way of sewing binding on your quilt.

 If you weren't at our meeting, Janice might still have a copy of how to do this very accurate binding technique.

 Next month we will be starting our Row by Row Mystery quilts!  Here is Misty's email to guild members.  If you know of anyone that wants to join us, please let them know about our guild and our Mystery quilt exchange before our next meeting so they can participate with us.

" Quilt Guild was held on Thursday. At this meeting the group decided to spend the 2014 year doing a round robin - row by row. This is completely voluntary. If you DO NOT want to participate you do not have to. Only participate if you can be committed to finishing 1 - 42" row each month Feb-Nov.  If you don't understand what a round robin is I found a description online:
 
A round robin quilt is a quilt made by a group of quilters rather than by one person. If there are six people in the group, six quilts are made during the course of the round robin, with each person finishing one section of the quilt before passing it on to the next person in line.
 
The quilt owner will create the original design and complete a central starter block of the quilt before passing it on to the next person in the group. That is the last time the group member will see their quilt before it is completed. Some groups agree on fabrics to be used, while other group members agree to each contribute a quantity of their own fabric to each quilt. The only universal requirement is that all the group members are aware of and understand the rules before they begin.

Read more: http://www.ehow.com/info_8729621_round-robin-quilting.html#ixzz2qiRD1bmX
 
So ladies if you would like to participate we have come up with some rules:
 
1. Each participant must commit to completing the provided row each month. (1 row Feb-Nov 2014)
2. February 2014 Quilt Guild Meeting is our Start Date - February 20, 2014
3. Each participant much come to February Quilt Guild Meeting with their first Row Finished 
4. Each row must be 42" Length (width is decided by each participant to meet their design needs)
5. Each participant needs to have a brown paper bag or Ziploc bag (hope that is ok with everyone) large enough to fit 10 rows plus 3+ yards of fabric. Each bag needs to contain participants name in black permanent marker with any other individual instructions you would like to include on the outside of the bag.
6. Each participant needs to include in their bag at least 3 yards of fabric they would like their rows to be made with. The 3 yards of fabric can be in any measurement cuts just as long as the total cuts equals to 3 yards. If you have more than 3 yards of fabric you would like to add you are more than welcome. We just ask that the amount is 3 yards or greater.
7. Each participants bag will need to be returned with the finished row and all unused fabric each month to quilt guild meeting to be exchanged for another participants bag. (Each participant will complete 1 row per month)
8.Applique and/or Piecing methods need to be used on each row. It is against the rules to have your row be a empty strip of fabric. Choose one method or the other to make a nice row. Please don't stress over your rows. Do what you are comfortable with but please do your best to make it nice. Don't do anything harder than you are comfortable with. We want this to be fun and to help get creative juices flowing. 
9.Have Fun and Be creative!!! We want this to be a great experience to help us grow as individual quilters and as a quilting guild group!
 
If you have any questions or concerns please contact me. I look forward to seeing each participants row in February. 
 
Any of you that are not wanting to participate in quilt guild for the 2014 year will you please contact me. I can keep your email on the mailing list or I can delete it per your request. "

Next Meeting will be February 20th, 6 p.m. at the quilt shop

Christmas Party

Had a great time at our Christmas dinner and exchange!  Yvonne and Dawn brought a couple of show and tells.

A pinecone made by folding 2 1/2" squares.  The fabric made it look so real!

Yvonne made a beautiful and fun Christmas quilt!  

Next meeting is January 16th at 6 p.m. at Valley Fabric!  Hope to see you all there!  Bring your friends along too---the more the merrier!  If you have any quilt blocks that need to be turned in (like me) please bring them so we can get the charity quilts finished.

November Meeting

What a brisk, cold night we had for our meeting in November!  Since there were only a handful of women that came, we put off our demo until January.

Misty did bring the flimsy's she has sewn from our blocks that we have contributed the last few months.  If you have any 10 minute blocks at home, please bring them to our December meeting so we can finish up our humanitarian quilts for the year.
 

 

Next month is our annual Christmas Party!  We will again have a pot luck.  A few of us are bringing soups so please bring whatever you would like to compliment them!
VERY IMPORTANT INFO:
our December party will start at 5 p.m. (NOT our usual 6 time)!!!!!!!
Starting earlier will give parents and grandparents time to get to the Ft. Bridger concert.

We will also have a GIFT EXCHANGE.  Bring a gift that costs no more than $5.  It can be anything.
The exchange will begin at 5:30 p.m.

See you at our December meeting on December 19th at 5 p.m.!

October 2013 Meeting

We had a fun meeting in October!  First off is Show-n-Tell:
Misty practiced her quilting skills with these cute panels and quilting them on her machine.  Very nicely done!  If you click on the picture, you might be able to see the bling she put on each panel too!
 

Debbie made a gorgeous quilt and then quilted it herself using a longarm.  She traveled to St. George, Utah and used one of the longarms at Let's Quilt.  Click on the store name to find out more about it.  Debbie had never used a longarm before and look how great she did!  Cost was $15/hour and took her about 4 hours to quilt.  So impressive!

Debbie also made this scarf for Cherie, who is posing in her best "Vanna" pose!

Cherie showed us a fun Halloween quilt!  She made her own pattern.  So Cute!  The borders surrounding the ghosts are small pockets where she can put candy.  The ghosts are made of tricot with button eyes. 

Closer look at details.

Cherie also made a gorgeous table topper.  Similar to a bargello quilt but is called a Stargello.  Cherie will be teaching a class on how to make these tabletoppers here.

Our demo this month was by Ellen.  She showed us how to make fat quarter bags.  What a fun way to use up our fq's that we have in our stash!  

Notice the bling on this bag!  These would be fun to make for the little girls in your life!

I can't believe I am going to say this!!!!!  We ACTUALLY played STRIP POKER!  Was fun being able to win other ladies strips.  Some ladies were more lucky than others though I noticed!

Cherie was very generous in bringing prizes to play another game.  I was one of the lucky winners and found lots of charm squares with a Western theme as my prize.  I think there are enough squares to actually make a whole quilt.  Thank you Cherie!

To play the game, everyone was given a paper plate.  Cherie told everyone that she was going to flip a coin and you had to guess if it was going to be heads or tails.  So we all had to put the paper plate either on our head or cover our behinds.  Ummmmm.....you can see that Cherie was getting a kick out of her game here!

Of course so was everyone else!  Again, thank you Cherie for your generosity!

We are wrapping up making Humanitarian quilts for the year but decided to make 2 more 10-minute block quilts---this time for girls.  We will use purple and pink for the centers of the blocks.

Here are a couple of pictures of the boy blocks we made last month.

They really turned out cute!

Remember to bring back your blocks next month if you took fabric to make one.
Our guild meeting will be the 3rd Thursday, November 21 at 6 p.m.
Demo will be by Jana and Janice.
Next year we would like to make a quilt for ourselves.  Be thinking of what we can do as a guild, whether it be a Row Quilt, Round Robin, Mystery, ????  Come with your ideas and how we can make it work for our guild!

September 2013

This month we decided to make a couple of boy quilts for the Make a Child Smile organization.  We will be making the 10-minute block with the centers being the same fabric and our blocks being fabrics from home.  Misty showed us how to make the block again.  The video can be found here if you need help.  Just click on the link to take you to the You Tube video.

 

 

 

Hailey showed us her darling baby's lil' dress that she made without a pattern!  So cute!

Gorgeous quilt from Yvonne!  The colors were beautiful all together.  Notice the braid border.  What a wonderful quilt for someone special!

Debbie shared her wonderful Fall quilt.  The green gives it such a wonderful pop of color with the gray and brown blocks!  

Janice is continuing to learn to quilt her quilts with her sewing machine.  What a sweet quilt for a special little one!

Makayla will soon be learning to sew and her mom, Misty, made her a sewing bag to take to class each week!  So cute!

Dawn demonstrated how she prepares her quilts to sew on her sewing machine.  She tapes her backing fabric onto the floor with masking tape so it won't move.  Then she sprays Sullivan's Quilt Basting Spray onto the fabric.   Walmart carries it.   Layers her batting, then her top onto each other. 
Dawn then pins and pins all three layers together.  She uses a handy tool called the Kwik Klip to pin all the pins closed.  

This is Dawn's favorite book that helped teach her how to machine quilt on the sewing machine.  You can find it on Amazon for a penny for a used copy!

She also gave us some hints during her demo.  She likes to use Blue Water Soluble pens to mark her quilting patterns.  Friction pens work good too as does the Chalk Roller.
Dawn uses a walking foot for quilting straight lines and a darning foot for curves.
Very interesting demo.  Thank you Dawn for sharing your talent!

Next month's demo will be given by Ellen.  Our meeting will be October 17th at 6 p.m.
Bring back your 10 minute blocks to our next meeting.
And do I dare say, bring your 2.5" x WOF strips to play Strip Poker!

August Guild Meeting

Okay ladies we ARE going to play STRIP POKER in September at our meeting!  Bring lots of 2-1/2" x WOF strips so you can play!  The more strips you bring, the more rounds you will be able to play.

We discussed making another humanitarian quilt with the blocks that Misty demo'd back in January.  You can reread the blog post and watch the video on how to make them here.  Misty will redemonstrate the block at our next meeting too.   We will decide on colors in September that we will use to make the blocks.  This will be a fast quilt and we should be able to make several of them because of their size.

We decided to use the blocks we made in December (see December blog post) to make a quilt for the "Make a Child Smile" charity.

We now have a guild library!  Several members have brought books to share and check out.

Cherie was kind enough to make the softee blanket that the guild presented to Hailey and baby Iva.  Beautiful baby girl Hailey!  Congratulations!


Janice discussed threads with us at our meeting.  In her research, she found that Aurifil Thread and Superior Threads have very good reviews.  She gave us a couple of websites on where to buy good quality thread.  http://www.hawthornethreads.com/threads/aurifil
http://www.superiorthreads.com/
Superior even has an education site on their website that is very interesting.
Janice told us that the higher the weight, the finer the thread.  This can be important when sewing different items.  She talked about tension with our machines.  Also interesting to learn was that spools of threads (different brands) are wound differently from each other.  If your thread is wound criss-crossed, then you should put it on your machine laying on it's side.  If your thread is wound round and round, it should be threaded upright.  Good info to know!

Show N Tell:

Jana was busy sewing little girl clothes for her granddaughters.  She was able to get all 6 of the grandchildren together for the first time and they had a photo shoot!  Patterns were found online in Esty shops.

Diane made a fun pocket quilt for her granddaughter.  Each pocket has fun bling on it!  So cute!

Janice made cute lil' ties for her little guys!

Janice also cut, sewed, bound AND quilted her pretty quilt!  First time she has quilted one of her quilts and she did a fantastic job with it!

Cherie brought several table toppers that she has made with the 5&10 Ruler.  Valley Fabric does carry the ruler.  You can also find the ruler here, along with videos on how to use these rulers from Phillips Fiber Art.

 

 

Gale finished her Labyrinth Walk quilt.  It is gorgeous!  It is a pattern by Chris Florence and Emily Sirkin and can be found in Quilt Magazine issue April/May 2012.  If you can't find that issue you can purchase the pattern here.   I was interested in knowing more about the designer and found he has a blog you can read here.  

Not sure who is demoing for our September meeting.  If it is YOU, it's YOUR turn on September 19th at 6 p.m.
And remember don't forget your strips!!!!!!!