Quilting In South Carolina: Sewing Day With Mom

Today I was able to sew with mom for a few hours. Mom needed to sew some borders onto two Habitat for Humanity quilts that she was working on . She used the 1600 quilt pattern for the two tops.

While mom was working on her two tops I was finishing up some more labels for the Habitat quilts. I made eight more labels. We use a generic label and place on all of the quilts that are donated for the Habitat for Humanity projects in our guild. The label reads:

From our hearts

to your

home.

Nimble Thimbles Quilt Guild

Mauldin, SC

Sue gets me to write the inscription on the label fabric then we add strips to frame the label. Love some of the fabrics I used this time for the labels.

Next mom and I worked on our Block Quest blocks for our quilt guild meeting. (Block Quest is where you are given a pattern and you can make as many blocks as you want, you get one chance for each block you make. We draw out one person's name and they get all of the blocks at the guild meeting). This month it is an applique block. We were to fuse the fabric but not do the stitching. The winner will be able to finish them in whatever way they want to so that they match. The fabrics were to be brights.

I was using Wonderunder Light fusible for this project.

I traced the pieces of the blocks onto the wonderunder light on the paper side of the fusible. Since I needed to make multiple copies of the pieces so mom and I both could do blocks I cut 4 pieces of fusible and stacked them together. I then put one staple in each of the pieces. After cutting the pieces out I numbered each piece of the fusible that were stapled together. Now I had 4 copies of each piece and only had to trace it once.

To make each block I just had to release the piece from the bottom of each pile and make the flower. The other pieces stay stapled together to keep things organized. If you carefully push the piece away from the staple it will release that side then you can carefully push from the opposite side of the staple and slide the piece off. I'm all for keeping all of the little pieces organized so I don't loose something.

Here is mom's first block.

Here is mom's second block.

I also cleaned up some scraps and added some more pieces to my stash of precut blocks and strips. Below is my "Scrap" bucket. I sent this home with mom so she can piece some string scrap blocks. We cut up some more phone book pages into blocks and strips for her to use as foundations. We'll decide what to do with them when she gets a big pile of them made.

While writing this I realize we really got a lot done yesterday. We also got my mother-in-law Alberta's quilt loaded into the hand quilting frame. The bee girls are coming over tonight play. Some of us will be hand quilting and some will be working on other projects. ALL OF US WILL BE LAUGHING. How wonderful laughter is for the soul!! Thank you Lord for the priviledge of having wonderful friends who can make me laugh.

In preparing to hand quilt this quilt I realized that my frame has been up in the attic for at least 10 years now and as much as I hate to say this and my bee girls will laugh and say.....are you crazy??? I have to go buy some thread. I realized that in all of the thread that I have I no longer keep hand quilting thread. So I had to go buy some hand quilting thread. So mom and I made a trip to the store for thread. (So have you girls stopped laughing yet?)