Country Women's Association

I joined a new branch of the CWA late last year and have been getting to know a number of ladies during this year.  Well as with the preschool that Matthew attends I have donated some time and made a quilt for our branch to raffle at the Spence Community Fair this coming weekend.  If you've read earlier posts you'll see the yellow and black quilt I made for the preschool, which incidentally raised over one thousand dollars, not bad really.  The winners were very happy.

Any way I used the same pattern for this quilt but very different fabric.

As with most sewers you can see my messy sewing/quilting area at the sides of the picture.

The daisy print is so bright and fresh I've called this quilt 'Welcome Spring'.

I am so pleased to be seeing some daffodils blooming and my fruit trees blossoming, Canberra winter seems quite long and we are pleased to know Spring is here, or soon will be. It didn't feel like it today

I used a pantograph to quilt the border of this quilt and then a small section to place the design in the nine patch blocks.

This did mean more stops and starts with the quilting but as there are only 16 blocks it worked out well.

How did she get the pattern on the blocks so neatly you may ask.  Here's my method for that;
I traced the portion of the design I wanted, then drew up an 8" square as per the block, trimmed my tracing to fit in the square and moved it around until it fit centrally, then taped it in place.

This is the panto pattern I traced from and used for the border, its called 'Shasta'.




Then I used the laser light on the machine to match up the points of the block with the points of the made up template, this way I can use the laser and know I'll stay within the block.

That reddish dot on the corner is my laser light matching a corner to the same corner on a block of the quilt top.

The template is placed on the table of my machine as I would for any pantograph pattern.

This is also a first for me, using just a portion of a pattern within a block.  I am enjoying testing out ideas like this to make sure they work.

I'll let you know how this quilt raffle goes as well.  Next post - some customer quilts!

Happy Quilting
Raylee

Wow it's September

Welcome back,
I have finally transferred a whole heap of photos from the camera to the computer so I  can show you some things I have been working on.  The transfer seems to be the delay point for me despite now knowing where the Card reader is.
While I've been absent from the blog I have not been idle, although battling a long term cold took its toll and the family shared it back and forth a bit.

One of my recent quilting projects was a quilt from the lady who won Viewer's Choice at the Glenrose Patchwork Airing of the Quilts in July.  The quilt is quite simply pieced squares on point. The fabrics are a variety of rose prints in dusty shades. The interesting thing about this quilt is the edges, they've been left square so the edge becomes a zig-zag.

This does add a lot of interest to the quilt when its finished, however I do not envy the owner the job of binding this quilt.  This is the first 'non-straight edge' quilt I have quilted and though it might look like it would pose a challenge I'll let you know how I manage the edges of quilts when quilting.

As any sewer will tell you one of the most annoying things to do is unpicking stitches.  This is double for quilting as the machines stitch quite fast and do lots of stitches in a small space especially if you make a mistake. It doesn't take long to quilt but takes forever to unpick a small distance of quilting.

To avoid any folding over and stitching of the edge of a quilt which would then require unpicking, I set the machine to baste and baste the edges down.  This small investment of time saves any catching of edges and quilting them over.

You can see the cream thread in a long zig zag basting stitch.  These threads are cut when the quilt is trimmed for binding and will not show in the finished quilt.  So if you have a desire to make a non straight edge quilt, go for it.




The quilting pattern on this quilt is Tea Rose and it was a great match. See below

Happy Quilting

Raylee