MISS LOU LEADS US TO IT!

Debbie Powell of Miss Lou's quilt shop came to our guild Wednesday to teach us Nancy Johnson Srebro's version of how to make the Tree of Life without diamonds or Y seams.  What a patient teacher!  This was definitely new territory for us, and we plunged into the exercise with both feet, confident that Debbie could handle anything that we screwed up along the way.

Although the TOL block in the middle is done a la Nancy Srebro, the rest of this quilt was completed as a round robin by Debbie's quilting group, and it is lovely!  I have to say I like the variety of the borders more than I like the quilt finish in Nancy's book.  I took this picture so I could remember how those round robin participants worked their layers.

I had done a mock up of how I wanted my colors to be distributed in my TOL, but I found matching the strips to be a little nerve wracking.  I had to really pay attention to how they went, following Debbie's pattern board carefully.

Eventually I completed the first half of the left half of the top of the tree (whew!  does that make it a quarter?  No, because then there was the lower half on both sides, half of which was background -- I think each of these initial blocks turned out to be 1/16 of the quilt as a result.)

Once you have the first two sections done, you fold them in half corner to corner to see if they followed your mock up or if you need to make changes.  Then you place one on top of the other, right sides together, and sew from the outer corner in.  Supposedly, if you have perfect 1/4" seams and your strips were cut accurately, the diamond intersections will meet perfectly.  Well, mine weren't, but the end result wasn't half bad!

By the way, you have to cut away half of the block after sewing the two sections together. Very wasteful of fabric EXCEPT if you're a a scraps lover like many of us.  Then you can just sew those discarded sections together and start a whole nuther quilt!!!

This is the TOL block, ready to have the several borders done.  This will be a joyful project to work on in the coming week(s).  It took me all day to get this thing together!  So it's definitely going to get finished!

Here are some examples of other class members' work.  Instead of folding them diagonally, we just placed the sections side by side so you could see how pretty their colors were and how nicely the diamonds magically appear!

Very springy! 

Bolder colors make this an intriguing and eye catching pattern!

I have to put this aside this week to do a customer quilt and clean my house before the ladies of my development descend upon it when we gather here prior to going to tea in Wake Forest Friday, but I'll keep you up to date on my progress.

TREE OF LIFE

One of the fun things about being VP of my guild is that the VP is in charge of finding out what classes the guild would like to have for the year and then getting teachers to fulfill those wishes.  Sometimes our teachers come straight from our own group.  For instance, we have had the snap purse, a lovely bargello and applique Christmas table runner, and Painless Cathedral Windows taught by our own members.  In the next few months, we will have classes on making a market bag, a beach bag, and fabric bowls by various members, too.

We are also fortunate to have access to outside instructors who stimulate our creative juices.  Marilyn Doheny and her 9 degree ruler, Sharon Stewart and her wool applique,  and Mary Nielsen introducing us to the Tri Recs tool have all graced our quilting efforts this guild year.

This Wednesday, Debbie Lou Powell will be showing us how to make the stunning Tree of Life quilt.  We have all loved these when we see them at shows, but making them has always been a challenge.  Working with bias in diamonds and sewing in Y-seams have always been challenging, to say the least.  Debbie runs an eclectic quilt shop about 30 miles from here called Miss Lou's, and most of us have already made it a favorite haunt.  Now she is coming to teach us her slant on this quilt, and I am very excited about it.

The actual Tree of Life pattern will be coming from the technique of Nancy Johnson Srebro, which makes it unnecessary to worry about piecing diamond shapes or Y seams.  I'm all for that!  To help us sort out how we want the colors to distribute in our trees, Nancy recommends making a mock up with fabric scraps, which are much easier to move around than any full size strips we might be using.  I don't know her technique, but above is my mock up, and I'm ready for Wednesday!!!