No Quilting Last Night

Sorry bloggers, but I didn't do much quilting last night because I went to my Quilt Guild meeting. I am a member of Friendship Quilters and I love all of the ladies! Each month, we are lucky enough to have some really high caliber speakers. Last night was no exception.

Our speaker was Anita Shackelford and her topic was "Personalizing Your Quilts! This is what she brought to so us:

Can you say "Wow!' All hand quilted too! I think that it took her 2 years to complete.

She personalized to the quilt in many ways. If you look closely, you will see that the vases are really the silhouettes of her two daughters. Plus each daughter got to choose which flowers they wanted in their vase. Here is a close up:

Here grandmother's broach inspired this block:

Just look at the details in these blocks, which are all done by hand:

She had many more things to show us, but these were the most inspiring!

I hope that you enjoyed the "quilter's eye candy". I have completed my first project for the "One-A-Month" challenge. It isn't as amazing as this, but it is a completed quilt. I still have to take pictures of it, so I will post them later.

Until Next Time...Happy Quilting!

Along Came Nina!

I have had this cute little March banner by Joined at the Hip pieced and basted for awhile (2months). UGH!Unfortunately, it got buried under the piles of projects on my sewing table, which is not good! So I decided to tackle some machine quilting and finally finish a project.

I am an eternal "beginner" quilter and my machine quilting is also on the "beginner" level. First, I hate to baste and second, I find that the rhythm that you must achieve between your pressure foot and the hand motion is difficult to achieve. Nonetheless, I insist upon quilting my quilts myself because I want complete the whole process.

Most of my quilting motifs are wavy lines with a few curls thrown in between. I don't do stippling because I either make them "too big" or "too small" and I don't find the motion to be natural for my hands. So this time I decided to branch out a little and quilt the banner with circular swirls or "cinnamon buns".

Everything was going along fine until "Nina" came along! "Nina" is the name that I affectionately gave to Cara's Bernina, which she brought with her when she came to visit me. Cara set up Nina, gave me a demo (and my DH), and let me test out my quilting on her machine. Here are my practice pieces:

Oh, BOY! What a difference! I even got creative and quilted the rest of the banner using this cute little flower!

Here is the completed banner. Do you think that I can convince my DH to get me a "Nina" of my own?

I attended my first quilt meeting with the Friendship Quilters. I took my little banner with me for "show-n-tell"! What a wonderful group of ladies and I can't wait until next month's meeting!

Check back again for updates on my projects and the special gift that I got from my Stitchers' Angel! (Hello to my angel!) Oh yeah....and you too RED !

Until next time.....Happy Quilting!