Friday 8 July 2011

Caverswall Quilt Cave

Margaret is only able to join us once in a while and today was her Spa day, that's what it feels like... She pieced her backing fabric, which also has butterflies all over it and made a sandwich. She ran out of pins so used tailors tacks to fill in the gaps... I never thought of that... for a smaller quilt I guess they will be fine. Margaret did quite a bit of quilting too, shadowing the butterflies to start with, once they are done she will stitch wavey lines through the rest of the sky bits... She needs this quilt (it's a bed runner) finished for 30 July so she calculated that if she gets the quilting finished at home ASAP, we can cut and add the binding on the 29th and she can do the hand stitching in her car on Saturday 30th... race on!

Kate is still super happy with her quilt progress. We auditioned various blues to use for corner stones but none were 'perfect'... so, the corner stones will be white... that might sound like a lot of extra work adding corner stones when she could just add another full strip of white... but for effect, it needed to be pieced... worth the extra fiddling you'll see.

Gilly... I had taken in a big bag of little scraps to see whether anyone would like them. Mum looked through for the bigger bits as she is working on a Hexagon quilt. Gilly was next... she couldn't choose which bits she wanted until they were all sorted out by colour... this made me smile... I don't sort by scraps by colour you see, I sort by size, if I sort at all... the table looked wonderful with the little piles. We had to root around for enough bags for Gilly to take every pile home without mixing them up again... we will have to wait to see what she makes with them.

My Mum Gwynneth finished off all 24 of the pineapple blocks, yes... already! So she spent  today cutting sashing and corner stones and stitching them in place. See that space at the top of the pile?... that block had the triangles sewn to the wrong corners so Mum will take a pause to run up another block to fill the gap, the 'different' one will most likely turn up on the back.

Helen took most of the day to make this stunning centre piece. I had been watching her concentrating on this one, it's quite intricate you see, lots of tiny accurate stitching over a hole... there was tear away stabilizer to help but that's all gone now... very clever.
Dotty continued to add Trapunto thread to stuff the necessary bits on her triangle block, the 'cheating Trapunto' didn't have the effect Dotty wanted so she's doing a little PMS (Pleasing My Self)

Barbie, with her broken toes, had decided to make the Quiltville Pineapple Blossom quilt. She's had a request for a brown, gold and cream quilt so, as she already had these colours in her ever increasing stash, she was able to start straight away. She sat opposite my Mum who is quite the expert with these Pineapple Blossom blocks by now so it was like having a private tutor all day. Barbie went home chuffed with her progress, armed with a list of necessary pieces to make the other 22 blocks... She'll probably finish them for next time as these are fun blocks to make.

We meet again on Wednesday 13th July & Friday 15th July. 10am - 3pm, as usual.

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