September Meeting Recap!

Happy autumn!  We had a short but sweet September meeting, followed by a great trip to the Boca Raton Museum of Art to view the quilt exhibit!  Here is a quick recap of the meeting:

1.  We admired the beautiful entries from StitchCraft's summer sewing challenge!  There were a lot of amazing entries, and it was fun to see the creative ways that everyone used the focus fabric.  We also found out that the grand prize for next year's challenge will be a BabyLock sewing machine!








2.  We admired the beautiful finished chicken block quilt, made with the paper pieced blocks from the August meeting.  It looks so fun and will be donated to a child in need, thanks to Project Linus!

Thank you to Jeanne for the incredible quilting!

3.  We also admired the completed Round Robin quilt!  This will also go to a child in need through Project Linus.

Another big thanks to Jeanne for quilting this piece!

4.  We viewed the great quilt blocks that folks made for our group quilt.  We hope to enter the group quilt into QuiltCon and/or the Broward quilt show.  

As a reminder, blocks are due at the OCTOBER meeting!  Click HERE for instructions.  

Some of the completed group quilt blocks.

More completed group quilt blocks.  Beautiful!

Fabric for the Group Quilt.

5.  We enjoyed checking out the Bee blocks for September.  Bee members were asked to make colorful wonky log cabins.  Love the wild colors and modern shapes!




6.  Quilt News and Events:
--The Boca Raton Museum of Art is still hosting a show called "Politics Not as Usual:  Quilts with Something to Say."  If you haven't had a chance to see the exhibit, don't miss out on this wonderful event! 
--The Gold Coast Guild is hosting a contemporary quilt show at the Highland Beach library from August 1st to October 26th!
--Quiltcon (the Modern Quilt Guild's first convention) will be hosting a quilt show in February.  
--Quilters are donating quilts to aid and comfort forest fire victims in the Western US.  General guidelines are: adults 72x80 inches, children 60x70 inches, and babies 45 inches square.  The quilts are being mailed out by the end of October.  If you're interested, email me for more information.
--The Mancuso World Quilt Show will be held in West Palm Beach from November 8th through 10th.  It is a great event, with lots of beautiful quilts and vendors.  The Gold Coast Quilters Guild is also having a special "red and white" mini-show at the event!
6.  We discussed the new Pinterest board for the South Florida Modern Quilt Guild, which you can find here:  http://pinterest.com/patchworkduck/south-florida-modern-quilt-guild-projects-and-insp/

7.  In lieu of "Things to Bring" for October, we are just finishing our QuiltCon group quilt blocks.  Feel free to also bring in lots of show and tell!

Show-and-tell:  As a final wrap-up, here are some great September show and tell photos!

October Meeting Reminder:  Save the date for Saturday, October 20th, from 10am to 12pm!  

As a special treat, we will have a very talented long-arm quilter guest speak about the ins-and-outs of longarm quilting.  Also, please feel free to bring in your show and tell, especially if you have Halloween-themed show and tell items!

Trinidad and England Flag Quilt

Some good friends of mine were getting married, and naturally I wanted to make them a quilt as a wedding present.  Both of these friends were born in other countries, so I decided to make them a flag quilt featuring flags of their home nations.

One side is the flag of the Caribbean nation of Trinidad.

The other side is the flag of England.  

FYI:  The flag of England (St. George's Cross) is different from the flag of the United Kingdom (the Union Jack).

Once all the research was done on the correct proportions, the flags were very easy to piece.  I was going to do straight line quilting, but I couldn't think of a design that would compliment both sides.  So I settled on a meandering stitch/stippling.  I practiced on 3 or 4 quilt sandwiches before tackling the flag quilt.  I think it turned out nicely considering it was my first time free motion quilting.  It is so much faster than straight line quilting!

Here is a close-up shot of the quilting.

Here is a close-up of the quilt label.  To label this quilt, I used a this tutorial, but wrote on the fabric with permanent fabric ink instead of disappearing ink and embroidery.

It was difficult to choose a fabric for the binding what would compliment both sides of the quilt.  Ultimately, I chose a tan color that doesn't stand out from either side of the quilt. I think it's perfect!

It's a small lap size quilt (3' by 5') but they should still be able to get some snuggles underneath it.  It also looks perfect at the foot of a bed or hung up on a wall, and maybe to wrap around a little one at some point in the future!