Wow! That was one long title! Last month, I hosted the inaugural meeting of the South Sound Modern Quilt Guild, currently meeting in Tumwater, WA at Ruby Street Quiltworks. At our first informational meeting we had over 50 people in attendance and at our second we had over 25 (great turn out for the second meeting). We decided as a guild that our first charity project would be to make quilts to donate to the Oklahoma City Modern Quilt Guild, who will be donating them to victims of the May tornadoes.
We had so many quilt blocks donated that we were able to make TWO quilts! I am so excited by this because our guild is so new that we haven’t even started collecting dues yet, that will be at our July meeting. To read about our second quilt, go check out Sew I’m Pressed – our lovely Vice President did the quilting on that one and let me tell you, she has some MAD free motion quilting skills!
This quilt was pieced by the wonderful Honnah, who is now our Fundraising Officer. She was so fast too! She got the blocks at our meeting on June 5th and had the top done on June 6th! I couldn’t believe it. Here is the top before quilting:
We had a last minute block arrive at our collection point and because we wanted to make sure every block was incorporated into the quilt, I did a pieced backing with the block as the focal point. I really love this backing.
With the exception of the center block, all the fabrics were found in my stash. I showed the top to the lovely Shanna from Fiber of All Sorts and Debbe from Pieces to Love and bounced ideas off them for the quilting. I am terrible at decisions like that! Shanna suggested using blue tape and doing straight line quilting at different angles on the quilt – it fit the back and front perfectly! Here’s a picture of the quilt all pinned and taped up. The cool thing was I was able to have it entirely quilted in just a couple hours.
When I finished quilting, I trimmed it and up and decided that I couldn’t let the cool backing go to waste, so I turned the backing to the front and it became my binding too! Let me know if you want a tutorial for how to do that, I will happily do that with my next quilt.
The quilting is easier to see on the back:
So there you have it! The first successful charity project for the South Sound Modern Quilt Guild. If you are local to the South Sound Washington area and are interested in joining, please head over to Facebook and join our online group – that is where we post all meeting information!
