Josh's Quilt

A couple of weeks ago, my mom called with some news. And an idea. One of her close friends' son in law has apparently been in the hospital for almost two months. As a complication of childhood cancer, he'd needed a heart valve replacement. He had that surgery and apparently almost everything that could go wrong has and he's had multiple open heart surgeries, pneumonia, fluid in his lungs, etc, etc.

His wife has been trying to keep things together for their small children and my heart aches for her. I can't even imagine what she is going through. Josh's doctors had asked for people to send cards, as keeping his spirits up is an important part of the recovery process.

Which lead my mom to her idea: she knew my guild was making charity quilts, would we be interested in making one for Josh? I ran the idea by my guild and was awed by the positive response. In less than two weeks we had gone from my inital post on the facebook group to the finished quilt being delivered to my mom's friend, for delivery to Josh.

Sewing for a Cause: Coming Together

The charity project for our guild is plugging along. As the instigator, I've taken on the task of sewing together the tops. We had enough blocks for three quilts, so it's been a bit of a project. I do have the first two sashed though! These will each get an outer border of white and then it's off to the guild members who have volunteered to quilt them! I still need to pull together the third top, but it will be a little different from these two, it will be pink/red and aqua/blue.

Sewing for a Cause: The Blocks are (mostly) In!

You may recall that a couple of months ago I kicked off a charity sewing project with my guild. Well, at our meeting last week we officially closed accepting blocks. (There are a few more already done that are en route to me, but for the most part, I have them all.

And aren't they a glorious sight? All said and done, we've had 25 blocks contributed. I'm going to make a couple more to get us to the nice round number of 27--enough for 3 lap quilts, each with 9 blocks. I'm so thrilled at how my guild mates embraced the concept and I love seeing how blocks made by so many different people all come together. Fabulous. : )

Sewing for a Cause

Each of the officers of my my quilt guild is also in charge of heading up a committee. As Treasurer, that means me. I opted to head the challenges committee and kicked off my first two challenges at our March meeting. The first is a simple color challenge, I picked paint chips and everyone has to make something, anything they like, that uses those colors. I'm looking forward to seeing what everyone else comes up with but, so far, I haven't done anything on it myself.

The second challenge is to sew blocks for a charity quilt (or quilts depending on how many blocks we get). For inspiration, I turned to Do Good Stitches as it is a modern bee which also makes quilts for charitable causes. I fell in love with this quilt. I adore the use of negative space and the bold scrappiness.

Our group decided that instead of going monochromatic, we would go rainbow! I've made the three blocks shown at the top of the post and have fabrics picked out for an orange one as well.

Detailed pictures and a link to the instructions under the cut.

Sewing and Quilt Expo

A couple of weeks ago my quilt guild headed to a local sewing and quilting expo. It turned out to be not quite as impressive as I hoped, but we still got to see some beautiful quilts, check out some awesome vendors, buy some cool things, and of course, hang out together.