quilt month

*** if you're looking for the v and co pattern giveaway, scroll down***

yes, yes, i know. officially, last month was national quilt month. but i'm taking a quilt class this month and finishing off my first self-designed quilt, so this is my personal official quilt month.for the next four weeks, this blog will be mostly quilt talk. i realized again while spending most of my day last friday valiantly trying to finish "out on a limb" before saturday, that quilting is lots of work. it's a big project. i enjoy it, but it does take a lot of time to get anywhere with a quilt. i'm looking forward to some small projects like headbands, aprons, and pincushions just as soon as these two quilts are done. or maybe i'll have to squeeze in a few small projects along the way, just for fun and the sense of accomplishment finishing small things brings.

 my friends, jill and mequell, and i are tackling beginning quilting together. i took the class last november and (mostly) completed my first quilt, including machine quilting it myself, but i was ready for some more instruction and a new pattern. with only three quilts under my belt, i still consider myself very much a beginner. mequell & jill have both sewn before, but not quilted, so i feel we're pretty evenly matched. the class runs mondays from 10:30 to 1:30, which just flies by and is never enough time. i got a few shots of our first class this morning, but we were so busy listening and getting started that i really didn't shoot much at all.

these are my fabrics, all from heather bailey's various collections. my quilting experience would have been much simplified if i'd chosen a jelly roll, but i really wanted to use these gals, so i set myself up for tons of cutting. louise, the teacher, surprised and delighted me by showing me how to die cut my own strips today. whew! that saved tons of tiresome cutting and time. it was like making my own jelly roll. sweet!

with 22 fabrics, i still had plenty of pressing to do. endless pressing involved when one is quilting.

jill is as picky as i am when it comes to fabric selection, so she was in the same pressing and cutting boat. by the end of the class, we were lucky to have finished cutting all our strips.lots of homework for both of us. the blocky quilt on the right side of the photo is the sample of the quilt we're making. it's a square within squares with a border, 4 blocks by 5 blocks and one big outer border. i'm always amazed how differently the same pattern will look when done in different fabrics. i think mine will look a lot different from louise's sample.

mequell was smart enough/lucky enough to find a jelly roll in fabrics she liked for this quilt. she was able to get down to piecing her strips right away. love the look of intense concentration on her face. gotta get those 1/4" seams perfect! those are her fabric strips in the foreground, sugar and spice by riley blake. i wish i'd taken a picture of their fabric piles before we started, but i didn't.

louise is such a wonderfully patient and encouraging teacher. she always makes me feel good about what i've done, even if it's not perfect. she will endlessly repeat and demonstrate instructions with ultimate patience. today she walked us through the entire process all the way up to piecing the blocks. none of us are even close to that and i bet my friends felt overwhelmed by the time we had to leave. but i've been around this block once before and i know that even though our heads were ready to explode, they'll do great and get caught up soon. it'll happen.  jill and i will probably be getting together later this week for a piecing party now that we have our strips cut.