As you may know, Chilliwack has two quilting guilds, a “day guild” and a “night guild”. I am the current president of the the Chilliwack PieceMakers Guild, the “night guild”, and will do some shameless promotion in this post 🙂 We have been very busy trying to adapt to the Covid situation. Our general meetings are every month on the third Wednesday night from 7 to 9 pm. We know that many quilters don’t like driving in the dark, especially in bad weather which is often given as a reason why they don’t want to join a guild that meets at night. This year, all our meetings will take place on Zoom, no driving involved. This is your chance to meet our creative group and join the fun. Zoom is super easy to use, you don’t need to sign up for an account, you just have to follow the invitation link. We ran two test meetings this past week for members to try out Zoom and had a lot of fun. Those who had never used Zoom before were surprised how easy it was. We are offering phone support and step by step walkthroughs, so far we have been able to get everyone connected, no matter how experienced or tech savvy they were.
If you are a local quilter (and local does not just mean Chilliwack, we have members from Abbotsford and Agassiz as well and would certainly welcome quilters from Hope etc… you get the idea) and would like to give our virtual guild life a try, please contact us through our website or leave me a message, and I’ll get you connected. Our September meeting next week will start slow, we want to make sure that everybody can find their way around Zoom, and we will mostly do Show & Tell, so everybody can talk about what they made during the summer. We will also have “Breakout Rooms”, a super fun feature of Zoom. If you have more than a handful of people in a virtual meeting, you can’t really get a real life conversation going, everybody will talk over each other, and you won’t be able to hear a thing. Zoom offers the possibility to divide participants up into a number of smaller rooms, and we will use this feature for our coffee break and randomly place a few people together in rooms to be able to chat and visit and meet new people. We will mix up everything once or twice, so it will be a bit like speed dating and much less intimidating than walking into a real life meeting where everybody seems to know each other.
For October, we have a virtual trunk show and quilting demonstration planned. You will be able to see everything on your screen in detail, much closer than you would be in reality. It will be like looking over the presenter’s shoulder.
We have to stay apart for a while longer but that doesn’t mean we have to be alone. If you would like to join us, please don’t hesitate to contact us, and we will help you get connected.
Welcome to this year’s Row Along, and thank you so much, Marian (of Seams To Be Sew), for organizing it again. The theme this time is “It’s A Garden Party”, and once again I had a hard time coming up with something. Weird, I know, because the possibilities are endless. Or maybe that was the problem. I just couldn’t decide and didn’t feel particularly inspired by any of the ideas I had. I thought about a desert garden and a Japanese garden and drafted all kinds of things but somehow it never came together the way it looked in my head. Finally I decided that I was making it much too complicated and had to scale down and simplify all my grand ideas, and I ended up with this lovely vine of coneflowers.
Our design drafts had to be handed in to Marian quite some time ago, or I would probably have ended up with a vegetable garden row. If you followed my Block of the Month posts this year, you know that I took up gardening during the pandemic as a way to pass the time, as many others did, and I am very glad I did. Watching my veggies grow and tend to them every day helped calm me down and keep my sanity. Well, mostly, in any case 🙂 I added a bug, a butterfly and a dragonfly to my row design, you can almost hear them busily humming and buzzing around the garden. I attached two borders to my row, quilted it and turned it into a wall hanging. I had a lot of fun filling the background with various designs. And once again I found the perfect backing fabric. I like to match the backing to the theme of the quilt, and I didn’t even think I would be able to find a coneflower fabric but I was wrong, I didn’t even have to search very long.
I also used the design in a shopping bag for my mom. Germans have always been good at carrying reusable shopping bags, there haven’t been free grocery bags in decades but you would still be able to get a free bag when purchasing clothes. That has changed in the meantime as well, and my mom asked for a pretty reusable bag to take along. I resized the coneflower panel for the bag and framed it with bright leftovers that I didn’t even think would go together but I actually like the result a lot. And so does my mom.
Northcott Fabrics generously offered their fabrics to all the designers again this year, and we could choose anything from their current collections for our projects. I chose three fabrics again, the ivory background, a green one for the vine and leaves and a brown one for the flower centres. Thank you, Northcott, for your beautiful fabrics.
9025-11 Essence
23332-76 Rod and Reel
9020-360 Toscana
The pattern for the row will be available for free download for a week. Afterwards the pattern for the complete wall hanging will be available for purchase.
EDIT: A week has come and gone, and the full pattern for the Coneflowers wall hanging is now available in the pattern store, if you missed the free row download.
Für die deutsche Version mit metrischen Maßen bitte dem Kauflink unten für die englische Version folgen und beim Checkout angeben, dass die deutsche Version gewünscht ist. Ich verschicke dann per email die Anleitung in der gewünschten Sprache.
And now it’s time again for a giveaway! This is organized by Marian and she makes the rules, you can find them at the bottom of this post. Please make sure you also read the details about shipping costs etc. at Seams To Be Sew. Our sponsor today is Northcott Fabrics, thank you for your generosity. The winner will receive one of the beautiful FQ bundles pictured below.
The Electric Quilt Company is also supporting the Row Along once again this year. This time you don’t have to be a winner to enjoy their generosity, they have supplied a coupon code that is valid for the duration of the event and can be used on any of their products except for EQ Academy. Use GARDENPARTY20 during checkout for a 20% discount.
I have been designing my quilts with EQ for 20 years, and I love the software, it offers so many possibilities. I couldn’t decide what fabrics to use for the borders of the Coneflower wall hanging, and I imported pictures of the ones I was considering into EQ and auditioned them. Here is a picture of some of the possibilities. To be honest, I still couldn’t decide, I loved the bright turquoise fabric but I thought the grey one looked so elegant. I finally let my husband pick, and he chose the turquoise/orange combination.
Comment moderation is turned off for today to make it easier for you to enter the giveaways. Please don’t leave your email address in the comment text. It is not necessary to do so, and the spam protection software will kick in and not publish your comment, so it will have to be moderated after all. I will be happy to manually publish it but please keep in mind that I am in the Pacific time zone and will still be asleep when this post publishes.
And last but not least, here is the full schedule, be sure to visit all the participating bloggers to see their fun projects.
Tuesday, October 13 Show and Tell Day Participating blogs to be announced
Marian’s Rules and Guidelines For Giveaways:
Rules and guidelines are also listed on the Rafflecopter window of each blog’s giveaway entry on their featured days post. Please take the time to read them.
Giveaways offered by sponsors are assigned to the various bloggers/designers for their featured day.
There are no prior announcements on who is doing which sponsor except to the sponsor and blogger/designers themselves.
You’ll have to visit the blog or the featured blog to enter the giveaways.
Some giveaways can also be entered at Seams To Be Sew. You must have commented at the blog of the designer/blogger’s post to enter at Seams To Be Sew, Winners who win from entering at Seams To Be Sew will be checked for the comment. This does not mean that commenting at Seams To Be Sew will get you an entry, it doesn’t.
When you enter a give away that asks you to answer the question asked on the entry form, you do need to fill in that box. No answer means your winning entry will be ignored and canceled.
You are only allowed to enter once at each of the featured day sites. Giveaways are different at each site, thus you can enter those giveaways.
I will start announcing winners on September 15, 2020, and finish announcing winners on October 15, 2020.
You must give a valid email address when you enter the giveaways, any email returned to me, loses the ability to win automatically.
You are given 3 days to answer the email, if you do not answer within 3 days a new winner will be drawn. Check those spam/junk mail folders, you may miss that winning email if you don’t do so because there are no exceptions to this rule.
If you are notified that you are a winner, in all cases except for digital downloads and gift cards/certificates, you will need to provide your name, address, city, state, zip code, country, telephone number, and email address.
No purchase whatsoever is necessary.
You must be 18+ in order to win a gift.
You are responsible for claiming and paying any tax owed on the value of any gift that you win. Prizes valued at $500.00 should be claimed.
All winners are chosen at random.
All winners will be announced on the blogs via the Rafflecopter entry form and/or post by the blogger at the site where they won and here at Seams To Be Sew. All winners must allow for their first name and first initial of their last name to be announced on this blog.
Odds of Winning a prize are based on a total number of rafflecopter entries during each week and in total for all giveaways.
This giveaway is void where prohibited by law.
Participating bloggers/designers may enter any of the giveaways.
The word giveaways in the rules and guidelines are also known as sweepstakes.
I will keep it short today as I am taking this week off, so you don’t have to read through my garden ramblings. I will be back next week after Labour Day with the start of this year’s Row Along with the theme “It’s A Garden Party”. I am scheduled to post on the first day which is September 8, so make sure you don’t miss the fun.
This month’s penguin is building a snowman… or maybe a snow penguin? The pattern will be available until the end of the month, as always, and then move over to the store when the October block is released.
EDIT: September is over, and the block has moved to the pattern store where it is now available for purchase if you missed the free download.
Für die deutsche(n) Version(en) mit metrischen Maßen bitte dem/den Kauflink(s) unten für die englische(n) Version(en) folgen und beim Checkout angeben, dass die deutsche Version gewünscht ist. Ich verschicke dann per email die Anleitung(en) in der gewünschten Sprache.
Isn’t this the cutest little bunny quilt that Brenda made? The finished quilt will have embroidered bunny faces and buttons sewn on for eyes and also the flower centres. Since embellishments can only put on after quilting, you will have to imagine these details. I love how some of the appliqué extends into the outer border. The quilting doesn’t show very much on the darker fabrics, I mostly tried to add some texture, and I even free-motioned some carrots in the background. It was a really fun project to work on.
This rather unusual modern quilt was made by Karen as a decoration for her sewing room. What a great pattern to showcase modern fabrics that you don’t want to cut into small pieces! The turquoise fabrics add a nice splash of colour to the white, black and grey palette. It was quilted with the modern pantograph “Bauhaus” but with fabrics as busy as these the quilting doesn’t really show, so pretty much anything goes.
This Tumbling Blocks quilt is another one of Darlene’s projects. She is a very prolific quilter and likes to make big quilts. I love quilt patterns like this one that create a three-dimensional illusion, and I love Darlene’s colour choices. This pattern requires a lot of mitered seams which can be quite a daunting task but the result is worth the effort for sure. What a stunning quilt!
This is Darlene’s version of Jacqueline De Jonge’s “Happiness” quilt. I have quilted another one before that was done in more muted colours and can be found here. Jacqueline’s company name is “BeColourful”, and her striking designs are just that, colourful. I love bright colours and enjoyed custom quilting Darlene’s project. I am still not tempted to make anything myself that involves a lot of paper piecing but quilting these is really fun.
Hannah machine-embroidered the honeybee blocks in this striking quilt. I love the hexagon honeycomb look of the blocks. She asked me not to quilt over the embroidery, so I only outlined the blocks by stitching in the ditch and added a design to the background. The sashing features bees busily buzzing from cornerstone to cornerstone. This was also Hannah’s suggestion, and I love how it turned out. The outer border picks up the flower design of the sashing print. Quite an unusual quilt, and lots of fun to quilt.
It feels like forever since I published the last pattern that was not a BOM block. And there is a good reason for that, I have been extremely busy with quilting this year. It feels like the past four months or so have been one continuous Christmas rush. So if you are planning to get a quilt longarmed by me this year to give away for Christmas, please get your name in the queue right now. I am currently booking for mid-October, and there is only a limited number of slots available before Christmas.
But back to the Stepping Stones pattern: I quilted my sample back in February, and I managed to bind it and even put the label on in March/April when the Covid restrictions had just started and everybody was still hoping it would disappear quickly. And then people realized it was going to be around for a while and they had nothing much to do, and more and more quilt tops started showing up on my doorstep. But I finally finished writing the pattern, and I am very happy with the way my sample turned out. It is based on the scrap quilts I made as samples when I first started my longarm business. I made three small quilts, the tops all the same, but quilted them in three different ways, one with a meander, one with an edge to edge pantograph and one with different custom designs. I honestly didn’t give much thought to the design back then, just threw together whatever I found in my scrap drawers but people have been asking about a pattern for the quilt, and I promised I would eventually write one. The original quilts were pretty small, so I made a bigger version, and I had a lot of fun quilting it. The block design is part of a panto set called “Signed, Sealed, Delivered”, and on the outer border I wanted to try a curved crosshatch that turned out really nice.
The pattern is available for purchase in the store section. It does not include strip piecing instructions. All blocks were made individually from scraps. The pattern will be available with a discount until August 25, 2020. Enter the code STONES during checkout for 20% off.
Die Anleitung für den Stepping Stones Quilt ist auf deutsch nicht verfügbar.
Jean chose the classic “Attic Window” setting to showcase this beautiful outer space fabric and turn it into a quilt for her grandson. Right now is a great time to be watching the night sky. Did you catch a glimpse of comet NEOWISE? We spent two evenings out watching it, and in addition we saw Jupiter and Saturn rise and also a couple of shooting stars. Speaking of shooting stars, the Perseid meteor shower is just a few days past its peak and should still be visible this weekend. But back to Jean’s quilt… we chose a pantograph with the fitting name “Starry Night”. I just did a tiny edit. In the original design the moon has a face contour, with a nose and open mouth which looks cute on a baby quilt but wasn’t really suitable for Jean’s project, so I changed this part into a curve and turned it into a simple crescent moon.
