September Meeting

I don't know about you but I LOVE September. It is when I really get that "fresh new year" feeling, much more so than in January. Sure, January has all the New Year Resolutions business, but those mostly just make me feel guilty because I know they are not going to last. And also, New Years is in January, which is cold and crappy and right at the height of winter, feeling like its never going to end. But September! Ah, September feels all full of potential. Full of fresh notebooks and sharpened pencils and the smell of erasers. Funny how I haven't been to school in yeeeeeaars, but still these associations persist. Anyhow, my point is, Fall is awesome.

And our first fall meeting of the Toronto Modern Quilt Guild was no exception. It was full of new faces and old faces and new fabrics and good ideas. Potential at its best.

After the business and introductions were out of the way, we did some show and tell as usual. Kristen brought in a beautiful quilt that she has sandwiched and started to quilt. She's decided to do a pattern of simple diagonals, but is going to continue to quilt it more densely. 

Doris brought in a beautiful small quilt, and original pattern full of appliqué and piecing. 

Doris is my hero because she always includes a label. One day, quilt historians will love her.

Doris is also very prolific, and brought in this quilt top for us to admire. I believe it is a pattern from the Transparency Quilts book by Weeks Ringle and Bill Kerr. 

Debi brought in the final quilted version of a top that she'd shown us a couple of months ago. 

She'd sent it out to be quilted by someone with a professional long arm setup. And boy, does it look amazing!

After show and tell we moved on to a little tutorial, led by Andrea. 

We talked about paper piecing, both the kind where you use the printed paper pattern as a foundation. 

And also traditional English Paper Piecing, well known for its use in making hexagons. 

This is a portion of my own personal hexagon collection. I have big dreams of completely a queen sized hexagon quilt, where no two hexes are alike. People have been very kind in sharing their scraps with me. This is a "lifelong" project, and I just hope to get it done someday, but for now I'm just having fun making hexies.

 Its such a simple, fun process. I love this kind of little handwork.

So perfect for throwing in your bag and having on hand for waits at the doctors office or unexpected bits of downtime.

During the meeting we also decided to make a charity quilt, and passed out some fabrics to use as a guide for the colour scheme as we worked on if over the moth. We also decided that we'd all make stars, of any type, so that we had a cohesive sort of visual theme, but also that would give people room to play. I'll be back next month with pictures of our individual star block, and the resulting top.