Field Trips in Fiber - Adventures in quilting, hand dyed fabric and fiber art.

CSQ 2013 Mystery Quilt - an offer for my readers

I've mentioned the Mystery Quilt that I've developed for my quilt club, Country School Quilters. We make these quilts for our local veteran's hospital and they are all delivered on Christmas Eve to veteran's that are hospitalized over the holidays. We, and a few other groups, make as many as we can  but never have enough for everyone. The recipients are veterans from all wars. Last year there was even one there from WWII! The veterans are so appreciative of these quilts and we received some really lovely notes from them.

I know that a lot of my readers have checked out the mystery quilt information so I wanted to offer some encouragement to any of you who might want to make a veteran's version or  QOV version. We discussed this at our meeting last night and while we would love to receive any finished quilts that you might make, we will also accept tops and backs and we will provide the batting and get them finished. 

If you want to make a QOV version you can contact Alycia and she will happily accept tops or finished quilts. If you don't know Alycia please check out her blog. She does great work with Quilts of Valor.

The mystery clues start Monday and you can get all of the fabric requirements and background information here. Clues will be published once a month. The veteran's version will complete in September and the QOV in October.

If you think you might join in please leave a comment here so Alycia and I can get a feel for how may quilts/tops that we might receive. 

As an added incentive, every quilt or top received and made from the mystery pattern will be entered in a drawing for a Stash Pack! Finished quilts will get 2 entries. Tops will get 1. If you are making a QOV you will send the tops/quilts to Alycia and she will keep a list for me for the drawing.

I hope you might consider it. Both are great causes.

 

My next veteran's quilt is a mystery

I've been working for a few weeks on a design for my next veteran's quilt/QOV project. After about 20 iterations I've finally settled on the design and then I decided to make it a mystery quilt.

My quilt club makes the veteran's quilts and we have a new blog.  I decided to post the mystery clues on the Country School blog to get our members using the new blog. But anyone is welcome to participate. You can get information on the mystery project here. Our veteran's quilts are generally 48" x 60" and that's what this mystery is for but I'm also giving instructions for a QOV size quilt by adding 3 borders. The quilt is all squares and half square triangles

You can make your quilt for any purpose that you wish but if you want to make the veteran's size and send the finished quilt to us we will be happy to have it to deliver to the veteran's hospital on Christmas Eve.

Here are the fabrics that I am using. I'm doing a veteran's quilt (the fabrics on the left) and a QOV (fabrics on the right).  That fern print is going to be one of the borders on the QOV quilt. 

Of course it's a mystery quilt so I can't work on it during Sewing Friday and Saturday and I'll have to get together another project for that. Maybe I need to pull out another of my UFO boxes and get something finished for a change.

 

Sewing Friday

Today was my favorite Friday of the month, it was Sewing Friday with the Country School Quilters. We had a great turnout today and everyone seemed to be energized with fun projects. I'm working on a veteran's quilt and a Quilt of Valor.

I finished up this veteran's quilt that I started last month. It (and the QOV that's in process) is made from leftovers from some other projects that I made from the Patriot palette. I rather like this one. Tomight I will get the cutting done for the QOV so I can finish it tomorrow. I might even be able to start something else. For now, this one goes in the to-be-quilted pile.

Fabrique-Istan fabric is finally available!

Do you remember my Illuminated Blocks quilt?

I made this back in October for Paula Nadelstern using her new fabric line Fabrique-istan.

The fabrics are finally available and my supply arrived yesterday. I love these fabrics and have been anxiously awaiting their release. I buy my kaleidoscope fabrics from The Cotton Club. They have the best selection of all of Paula's fabrics plus lots of other symmetry fabrics. They have the complete Fabrique-Istan line including several kits. There's even a kit for my Illuminated Blocks quilt!

I'm not affiliated with The Cotton Club in any way, I'm just a happy customer.

String quilts for veterans and bad math makes a better quilt

The second Saturday of every month my quilt group has "Sewing Saturday" where we all get together at our normal meeting place and sew all day. It's like having a little retreat every month. I use that time to work on my community service quilts, primary QOV quilts and quilts for our veteran's quilt project. I try to plan 2 quilts at a time and make basically the same quilt for both. 

I finished the last 2 quilts in August and have been making string blocks ever since for the next 2 quilts. I finished the last of the string blocks this Saturday, thankfully. I really don't enjoy making string blocks and I got really tired of these.

This weekend I decided to put them all on the design wall and get the blocks arranged and read to sew together in February.

 

This is the veterans quilt. The matter is from Mollie except that I made my blocks 8.5". The veterans quilts are 48 x 60 and I think this is going to look very nice once it's all together.

The blocks for each row are neatly stacked, labeled and ready to sew next month.

I was so please with myself that I put up the blocks for the QOV. It need to be 8 blocks wide in 10 rows. Imagine my shock and horror when I realized that I was 13 blocks short! 

To think that I was an accounting major and I can't even count quilt blocks correctly. It's a wonder that I had a career at all. 

I started to pull some fabrics for the large triangles and get them ready to sew up in February but the more I though about it the more I could not bear the thought of making one more string block. Instead I headed to EQ to see if I could some up with another solution using only the blocks I had.

This is what I came up with and, I admit, I think I like it better than the veterans quilt. I didn't like the large gold triangles once I got it on the wall so I switched those out for dark ones. This layout left me with 4 spare blocks and I traded a few more with the veterans quilt so I could get all dark triangles in this one. Then I found the leftovers from a hand dyed backing in my stash to use for the sashing and I was good to go.

You can get an idea of what it will look like here and I like it a lot. I think it makes a really interesting quilt. Sometimes the mistakes lead us to better designs.