TEAMWORK

The Lake Gaston Piecemakers Quilt Guild meets every Wednesday for one reason or another.  The first Wednesday of the month is Scrappies.  Those of us who love scrap quilts bring our projects to a local church gathering room and sew together, enjoying the cameraderie in an otherwise solitary pursuit.

Today, eight women joined me to cut more 5" squares from the last of the fabric manufacturers' samples as well as a huge garbage bag full of scraps that a lady from my community had given me for potential use by the guild.  After two hours, we had pretty much cut what could be cut from all of the fabrics, and now it falls to me to divide them up into designer or color sorted packets for use in one of our Outreach quilts this month.

Next Wednesday is our guild meeting, during which these packets will be distributed to anyone who wants to participate in the Disappearing Nine Patch marathon on the following two Wednesdays.

This cluster of purples caught my eye, especially the set of patches with the soft peach in them.  If no one claims this set, I'm going to make another D9P with these and use a rich peach as the "pop" fabric in the middle of each block.

Meanwhile, my Lucinda Brodie progresses, albeit slowly.  The flying geese, above, are ready to go as soon as I make the last 30 of them.  During this week, while DH is waiting to start his new job next Monday, we two have been doing household projects here and there, which has diverted my focused energy from getting my basic building blocks done for my quilt.  However, tomorrow, DH is going to his new job to set up his tool boxes in their (hopefully) permanent home, and I have decided to stay home and sew to make up for lost time.

I'll miss him... for a while.

Where did the time go?

I can't believe it's been over two weeks since my last post. During that time I finished another quilt for the guild. This time it's for sale, straight out. A group of ladies from the Lake Gaston Piecemakers Quilt Guild put together this wonderful arrangement of scraps called the Rick Rack Road Quilt. This pattern was designed by Deborah Hagy Hansen and was found in the Fall/Winter 2007 issue of Quilt Sampler magazine.







When we first moved to Virginia three years ago, my husband said to me, "Well, you keep making all these quilts. When are you going to make one for me?" So this was the quilt I made for him, and we use it in our nicest guest room. Why there? Because our guest rooms are in the basement -- or what I would have called the basement in our Maryland home. But down here on the lake, there are no basements. There are just lower living areas, and everything looks out on the lake and its peacefulness and beauty. So our second great room is downstairs with the guest rooms and my quilting room, etc. The "theme" downstairs is "The Lodge". My hubby's Rick Rack Road quilt has hunting and fishing and lodge-y things in the fabrics, so that's why its home is downstairs in The Lodge.



Anyway, when I saw the blues and purples in this quilt, I immediately thought of fine wines. One of our guild members donated a wonderful fabric with wines and vineyard scenes on it for the backing. You can see that I put echoed feathers in the light areas of the zig zags, but for the deep purple strips that course down the length of the quilt, I used a wonderful vine pattern and stitched it in copper metallic thread. Stunning, if I do say so myself!

Once that quilt was finished, I needed to get a Quilt of Valor quilted for one of QOV's prolific quilters, Sue Bennett. QOV is an organization that makes quilts for wounded soldiers. You can access their site at www.qovf.org. If anyone out there would like to participate in this worthy endeavor, please contact them and start quilting! Here's a picture of Sue's quilt, all done but not trimmed or bound yet. She'll be doing that part.



So enought of these freebies! Right now I'm working on a customer quilt for a Golden Retriever benefit raffle. But I'll post that after I get the work done on it.