The other night at Quilt Guild we were kinda feisty. It was fun and everyone had a great time. This is a "sewing bee" type guild. We have a mini meeting if anything special is going on. We sent the sign up sheet around for the December dinner. We meet a bit earlier, have some hors dhoueurves, dinner, a grab bag type of thing and show & tell of course. It's fun. I have to figure out what to do for this. Maybe I'll make one of my smaller totes. Or head to the quilt shop. I don't know yet, there's a bit of time.
I brought two quilts to baste, one is the guild quilt which I'm going to quilt over the next couple of weeks. A couple of ladies were seeing the quilt for the first time. A few were picking out their blocks. It's funny, sometimes you can't remember just which one you did. Neat thing though, even though we had the same "challenge" fabric each block is completely different! I'll start quilting that later today or tomorrow, depending on scheduling.
The second quilt is "49 Pieces of Chocolat". I started quilting that yesterday. I'm using a wool batting and enjoying the quilting! There is significantly less drag than with cotton. Wow! I'm impressed already. Because it's wool there can only be about 4" between lines of quilting stitches so I'm getting to do a lot of quilting. I started doing some large stippling yesterday then was ripping it out as I chatted with Neen on the phone. The thread is beautiful but it just wasn't working for the quilt so out it came!
Oh, the bonus for me the other night is that one of the quilters brought basting spray and basted both of my quilts! How cool is that. She did this as a demo. What an incredible gift! A couple of other ladies helped me spread the quilt parts out on the floor and one even took home some excess fabric from one of the backings. She liked it so I gave it to her. I like sharing fabric with friends!
"49 Pieces of Chocolat" isn't the first quilt that I've ripped quilting out on. I'm in the process of ripping out quilting from a quilt I did a few years ago. This has been sitting unfinished for about 2 years! Can you imagine? Being quilters I'm sure you can. I think I quilted this around the time I started machine quilting so I didn't quite know what I was doing. It's a learning quilt but I really like the top so I'm ripping stitches out, I'll probably be doing that for days. I'll put in new batting a new back and a new binding. Yes, you read that right, I'd already stitched on the binding and was working on hand stitching the binding down when I just stopped. I wasn't happy so I just never went back to it.
I watched most of episode 112 of the Quilt Show yesterday. The featured guest is Libby Lehman. WOW is all I can say. I really appreciated a couple of things she said and mention one here. Libby said that it's okay if we don't finish a quilt. Perhaps when we get to the end of piecing the top we've learned all we can from that particular quilt and it's time to move on. I agree with her, sometimes it is just time to move on. One good way to handle these projects might be to have a swap or challenge at your quilt guild or with an on-line group if you don't have a guild. Bring in all of the quilt tops or parts of quilt tops, have a swap and let someone else finish the top. You can either give them back to the original owner or keep them yourself, decide this before hand so everyone knows what you're doing. Have a time limit and then show & tell so each quilter gets the opportunity to see how their work was finished. The program chair for one of my guilds did this and apparently it's working well. I think we're having the big reveal at our meeting next week. I'll be exciting to see what everyone brings in.
Happy Quilting!
Teri
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In my quilting experience I have reached the place where I think anything goes, throw out the rules...and if I don't wish to finish a quilt, I feel free to move on. And, speaking of ripping out quilting, I have a project that is going on SEVEN years old. The top has been finished fine, it's the quilting that bugs me. My plan was to do blanket stitching by hand around all the applique. Since there is much, I realized that this is an undertaking that I don't wish to continue. That leaves the alternative of removing the blanket stitches already done, and probably loading the quilt on the longarm and doing something with it there. I may even divide the top into fourths as it is a 4-seasons in four quarters pieced together. If I divide it I can have 4 seasonal wallhangings. I'm certainly considering it.
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