Long overdue crafting post: quilting

After making a lap quilt for Baba (t!’s grandmother) for Christmas, I took a bit of a break from quilting. Over the couple of months I’ve been slowly getting back to it.

My first project was aborted after a couple of weeks. I joined an online group that is spending the next 18 months making individual reproductions of the Jane A. Stickle Quilt. Mine was going to be batiks and unbleached muslin:

I got about 10 blocks made (of 225), and then quit the project because the group’s schedule was just too demanding – I couldn’t keep up with doing 4 of these a week, I wasn’t getting any other quilting done at all. Maybe I’ll try again when I have a few more years worth of quilting experience under my belt.

Instead, I joined a one-block-per-month swap, which is a much easier pace to keep up with. I’m also participating in an international quilting round-robin, where an individual quilt gets sent ’round the world, with each participant adding an outer border. There are six in my group, and this is the latest quilt I added to: The four-pane centre was made by Elle, who lives in Spain, and the first border (the multi-coloured Flying Geese) was added by Mary in Washington State. I added the current outer border and then packed it and sent it off to Colletta in Pennsylvania. Elle will eventually get her quilt back with 5 new borders.

I’m expecting to receive the next quilt  (Leslie in Ireland’s) in the mail soon.

I’m very much enjoying my quilt guild’s monthly meetings, activities, and classes. I’ve also been invited to the local Thursday evening sewing group, which meets in my neighbour’s farmhouse kitchens every week for sewing, chat, coffee, and cookies. We work on our own sewing & quilting projects, and we also make quilts for Victoria’s Quilts, a charity that distributes hand-made quilts to cancer patients across Canada.

I also have another large quilting project on the go, but as it’s destined to be a gift, it’s a secret for now.