I'm in the Atlanta area this weekend

I came from VA to the Atlanta area yesterday to participate in the Greater Atlanta Quilt Shop Hop. I signed up for the bus tour that between today and tomorrow will take us to all 13 shops. I am staying with DD and DSIL in Marietta and have to leave in a few minutes to drive the 15 miles or so to Intown Quilters where the tour starts. Yes, they suggest that I allow about an hour to get there since I have to go on I-285 from Marietta to Decatur. At times like this I have to remember exactly why it is that I want to move to the Atlanta area when DH decides to retire! The reason is that 3/4 of our kids and all of our grands live here between Athens, Marietta and McDonough. Wish me luck on the drive. The funny thing is -- this shop is across the street from where the Marietta family used to live! Oh well, here goes.

The other two blocks for an ALA quilt

Here are the other two blocks that I recently made for a different quilt for the ALA BiblioQuilters. This quilt will have all purple and green Log Cabin blocks, and I volunteered to make one of each. It will also be part of the Silent Auction that will be held at the American Library Association meeting this summer in Anaheim. The center block will be the same in all of them, and the organizer also sent one purple and one green fabric, along with one beige that we could use if we wanted to. I used her purple and green ones on the longest outside positions, and the beige is in the top center of the purple one. I had not made a Log Cabin block in a long time but liked doing these and now want to do some more for myself!

Sterling Touch Quilt Blocks

Recently I joined the ALABiblioQuilters Yahoo Group - a small group of librarians and library-related folks who make quilts to be in the silent auction at the annual American Library Association conference. Since I attend this conference most years with my husband I offered to help make some of the quilts. This year they are making three, and I am helping with two of them. I have finished the two blocks for the first one - "Sterling Touch." This pattern was in Quiltmaker last year. The organizer of this quilt sent me 3 pieces of material - I needed to use at least one in each of the blocks. The rest of the fabrics were to come from my stash. In this one the fabric of hers that I used was the tan with burgundy brush strokes in the small triangles on the outer edge. This is the bottom center block. The second one that I made was the left center one. The fabric that she sent that I used in this one was the burgundy oak leaf design in the center. The organizer of this quilt converted the patterns that were in the magazine to paper-pieced designs. It took me a pretty long time, and a special trip to a quilt shop 45 minutes away from here, to come up with fabrics that I hope she will approve of!

The other quilt I am helping with is a log cabin design - I have one of them partially finished and have selected the fabrics for the other one, and hope to finish them both today. No quilting since Friday night -- we spent the weekend painting our hallway. We finished just in time for me to watch the last few laps of the Daytona 500! None of my favorite drivers finished in the top three but it was an exciting finish!

Questions about Guild Size

I recently volunteered to be on a committee for my guild to come up with some ideas for having small group experiences within a large guild. How do you put people together diplomatically, or do you let them put themselves together by interest group, geographically, etc. And are there other ways of having the large group seem small enough to make friends and have a chance to enjoy being with each other? At the moment our guild has 63 members, and probably 20 of these have joined in the last 2 years or less. If everyone on the rolls came to our monthly meeting it would be standing room only. We are currently using a place for our guild retreat that can only hold 22 sewing machines, and some people are unhappy about that. Some have suggested that we limit our size to 65 - but several of us are opposed to that at this time. If any of you have ideas about our concerns please let me know. Our committee is having its organizational meeting this Saturday, but our investigations into this issue will be going on for awhile.

Center of BargelloBowl is Finished!

I was up until 3 am, but did get the center of my BargelloBowl finished. It is 48 1/2 by 64 1/2" - each square is 2", so there are 768 pieces in it! That is not many pieces for one of Bonnie's scrappy quilts, and with only 32 different fabrics I'm not sure it qualifies as "scrappy." I am very happy with it, and am now thinking about borders and binding, and then quilting. For the border I am thinking of using the purple "Raindrops" with maybe squares or rectangles of the other fabrics arranged to look like they are floating on the purple. Not sure how to do that yet, but I am thinking about it. This was a fun quilt to do, a design that I had wanted to do for a long time, and pretty quick, though several others on QuiltvilleChat got finished way before me! Getting the intersections to all match up worked well most of the time, but at 3 a.m. I am less of a perfectionist! I hope that I find the time to do other bargellos. I have a book of bargello designs in needlepoint from 1967 - might be fun sometime to convert some of those to quilting. I also ordered the Twisted Bargello pattern that so many on QuiltvilleChat have talking about.

First Half of BargelloBowl Quilt is Together

Thanks to all of you who replied with your thoughts about which layout I should use. I finally decided on using just one square at the top and bottom of the stairs. I am not sure what my quilting pattern will be but I think I will try to follow the lines of the fabrics and if that is the case I thought it might be easier to do if there was only one block at the ends of the stairs. I have 12 of the 24 strips together and am now working on the 2nd half, then I'll sew the two halves together. I'm still hoping to get it finished before I go to bed, but we'll see. I've had some trouble getting a few of the seams to line up correctly, but I am trying to not get frustrated! Here is the first half I also took time out to fix pizza for dinner - from scratch, including the dough! This would have been a good day to order out, but our tradition is that I always make it at home. It was good, but took about 2 1/2 hours for fixing, eating and cleaning up. And watching all those commercials took time too! Some of my favorites were the baby for eTrade, the dog and the horse for Bud, James Carvill and Bill Frist for Coke --- oh, and the oboe player who became a football player. It will be interesting to see which get the most chatter over the next few days.

Back to the machine now.

Layout question on BargelloBowl Quilt

I have cut my 4 tubes of strips and am laying them out to see how I want that to go. Can't decide between having one square at the top and bottom of the "steps" and having 2.

I will sew the first six strips together and then see if I can decide - and in the meantime might get some input from others.

My fabrics for the BargelloBowl quilt

I now have my fabrics cut for the BargelloBowl quilt. I have agonized over the fabrics I wanted to use for way too long - after all it is supposed to be a scrappy quilt, right? Well, I decided to use teals, purples and blues and only 32 fabrics, so each fabric will go completely across the quilt. Here are some pictures of my run. I just laid out the strips on top of each other to get the general idea of how it will look. They are shown in order from top to bottom.





Now I need to start sewing the 4 groups together. It's a good day for staying inside here - freezing rain, ice and sleet apparently this morning and even though the temp is 37 now there is still ice on the trees and bushes. I do have to go out later for hair appt, but I'll get some strips together before then I hope.