February Show-n -Tell

Our February meeting was amazing! Not only did we have the wonderful 'Childhood Memories' suitcase collection from the Contemporary Group of the Quilter's Guild on loan but we had a wonderful array of quilts in our 'Show-n-Tell'.

The quilt above was made by Lesley using curved piecing. Here are more of our member's quilts:

 Gwenda's quilt is made from satins and features beautiful hand embroidery.

 The 'Bag Ladies' show off the bags made at a recent workshop.

 Sue used lovely zingy colours for this large bed quilt.

Lesley chose a really interesting arrangement for her log cabin quilt.

 Thelma showed us two fun quilts with stars and pinwheels.

 Jean proudly displays her first 'art' quilt

 Mandy made this fantastic African themed quilt. If you look closely you will see lots of animals hiding in the pieced blocks and appliqued on the surface.

Helene is the newest member of our group and brought along this fantastic hand-pieced hexagon quilt. She's using the English paper piecing method and it's huge!

Hazel's simple charm square quilt has a machine finished two colour binding.

Muriel adapted a Rennie Mackintosh design for this little applique picture embellished with stitching and beads.

Next month we'll have a demonstration of Free Motion Quilting with Hazel and we'll look forward to seeing more of our members quilts!

Block Challenge!

In preparation for our Quilt Exhibition on April 14th at Clifford Village Hall we're challenging our members to make blocks for a raffle quilt. The block instructions and videos to help you to sew them are on the free Craftsy Block of the Month. The block above is the Asterisk block which Janet Bottomley taught us to sew in October last year. There is a second block available on Craftsy's January BOM:

Let's see what everyone comes up with!

November Show 'n' Tell

We've Been Liberated!

Yesterday we were very fortunate to have Janet Bottomley teach a workshop on Liberated Piecing. Janet recently inspired us with a talk on the subject and we couldn't wait to get started. The liberated star blocks above show just one of the three blocks we all made on the day. Read on to see more!

Janet had brought lots of her blocks and quilts to show us:

Janet loves bright colours! She encourage us to use scraps and that wasn't a problem as some of us had brought along huge bags of fabric remnants! We weren't allowed to spend too long choosing colours but  all the finished blocks looked lovely. First we made square in a square - liberated of course:

then 'wonky'stars

We were very impressed with Muriel's liberated star!

The third block was the asterisk

This was great fun to sew and was a good way to use up thin (1") strips of fabric.

We all had a wonderfully day of sewing and some even had time to make extra blocks or use up some 'crumbs' with truly liberated piecing:

Finally here are a few more of Janet's beautiful quilts:

And she brought her very first quilt to show us:

If you'd like to learn more about liberated piecing look out for Gwen Marsten's book:

and visit Bonnie Hunter's blog http://quiltville.com/