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Last week I had a fun day sewing with a couple of friends. My Sweet Babboo was going to work on a car project with a friend of his, whose wife is one of my sewing buddies. She invited another quilt guild member to join us and we spent a lovely afternoon sewing and chatting while the guys worked in the garage. I had a project in mind for a charity quilt with a hard deadline, so it was the perfect time to get started. I cut a bunch of squares at home first.

I was offered one of her ...

I finished one of the quilt tops from the Orange Tree Quilters group. Another beautiful little quilt!

Like the colours...very tastefully put together.

Its a smallish sort of quilt...from memory about 52in square. In looking at it I was unsure how to quilt this. Did ...

 I had some unexpected sewing time at the end of last week so I decided to add the inner border and a pieced outer border to my Potato Chip Block quilt.

I used up all but about a dozen of the pieces I cut for this project! The inner border was cut 2" wide, just like all the pieces. It took me a little bit of trial and error to get the outer border pieces sewn so that the pattern continues around the corners AND no fabric was sewn to itself. That last part got harder as I had fewer ...

‘As we embark on our 10th Annual Charity Quilt, we continue to be amazed by the generosity of this sewing community and inspired by the stories of the children who have been granted life-changing Wishes.’ Fatquartershop The fundraiser works by offering the Bountiful patterns as FREE downloads during the event for a suggested donation to the Make-A-Wish Central & South Texas campaign. From March to August, Fat Quarter Shop will publish a new pattern on the first Friday of each month. Watch the introductory video here Block Releases and Videos Visit this page every month to get your Free block patterns ...

 I finished this quilt recently.

I used some scraps of older Kim Diehl fabrics and the Cats Cradle ruler from Creative Grids.

 I did a big clean out of my office at my shop last week. I threw out a bunch of junk and found a few treasures.

I found a one yard piece of convenience fabric (cheater cloth). I also found a scrap of batting that was the perfect size, left over backing fabric from a shop sample that was the perfect size and leftover binding fabric from my binding leftovers stash at home. So this project cost me nothing!

Not sure if I will just donate this to my local guild for them to do whatever they want with it ...

Missed out on the To Do Tuesday post, but we had people over for a few days so I did not get much done. Will link up again later this week.

 I recently came across a new-to-me ruler: Cat's Cradle Tool from Creative Grids.

I am thrilled to announce the generous sponsors for the Positivity 2022 Quilt Along to make Mercyful Quilts. There is a lot of information here, so you may want to bookmark this page.

If you are new to the Positivity QAL or have not heard of Mercyful Quilts, you may have some questions. Well, I have answers :-)

 My mom pieced the top of this quilt and sent it to me to finish and donate to charity.

For the back I used this adorable elephant fabric.

To quilt it I used a few different rulers.

In addition to the two above, I also used a straight ruler for stitching in the ditch. I stitched in the ditch around all of the blocks first. Then I used Elvira to quilt the nine patch blocks.

The nine patches were made from 2 1/2" strips and Elvira is designed to quilt this pattern on 2" finished size pieces.

I used ...

Hello friends. You know how I like the idea of paying it forward. A quilt donation is a great opportunity to do that. Often the question is asked, where can I donate a quilt? Today I am honored to introduce you to a family that has come up with a plan to raise money for charity one quilt at a time.

The Arnold family created The Sandpiper Project, an online silent auction via Facebook to raise money for Make-A-Wish Oregon. After their daughter, Elizabeth (Liz), was declared cancer-free, the Arnolds were so full of gratitude that they wanted to find ...

I completed the quilting on this before Christmas but just finished the binding. It would have been better to photograph it outside, but we finally got snow on New Year's Day and I didn't feel like putting on snow boots to go out in the back yard to take a picture.

 This is third quilt I quilted with my new Q20 sit-down machine. It is a digital sample (that is, the quilt is printed on the fabric, not pieced) that I got in my shop back in 2016 for some fabric I had in the shop at that time.

I quilted it in what would be the ditch if it was pieced using a straight ruler. Then I added a bunch of free motion quilting to fill in.

Normally I wouldn't add this much quilting to a charity quilt but I was really having fun playing with my new machine ...

 This is the second quilt I quilted with my new Q20 sit-down machine. I used a ruler to quilt wavy lines across it.

Yes, I probably could have done this design without a ruler, but I wanted to experiment with using a ruler on my new machine. Worked great! And the best part is that I can use my regular Bernina ruler foot (#72 foot) on my Q20.

For the back I found this fun print in my stash that complemented my color scheme on the front.

This quilt will be donated to my local hospital for the oncology department ...

 I have no idea when I pieced this top but it was well before I opened my shop in 2016.

For the backing I found this very old print in my stash. I must have really loved it when I bought it because I have 5 or so yards of it! 

This quilt will be given to my local guild to donate to a local charity. It finished at about 40" by 50".

 I have been bonding with my new Q20 machine.

I have quilted two charity quilts already with her but don't have pictures of those yet for you. Next time! The first one I just did a quick all-over meander to get used to the machine. The second one I quilted with a ruler that I have had for a while. I'll give details on that when I show you the finished quilt.

Right now I am working on a third charity quilt with her. I'm getting fancy with this one. It is an old digital sample that ...

Last week, I did some blocks for the Safelight quilts project that my guild’s local area is coordinating. I used a couple of pretty prints, so I could do blocks with florals and whites. Making a lot of half square triangles at once means allows the prints to be mixed between blocks.

I wanted to show the ladies what I had in mind. Here are the florals with white tone on tones.

One question asked is could white backgrounds with tiny prints be used. The answer is really no. As you can see in the quilt top below that ...

Because life is life, I didn’t get to sew as much as I hoped for either the Friday Night Sew In (FNSI) or National Quilting Day.

At first, probably because, again, life is life, I couldn’t even settle in. I cleaned. I sorted. I moved fabric around.

Finally, I decided to choose backs for a few charity baby quilt tops recently finished.

Then I worked for a while on a new baby quilt project, also for charity.

And that was about it.

But, any sewing is better than no sewing, and my room is in better shape.

This past week, I loaded up a charity quilt and began the quilting on it. My friend said to use whatever I wanted for thread color and pantograph pattern. Auditioning threads, I decided on a light golden taupe with a pantograph that has curves.

I showed this quilt on Sunday, and didn’t know the name of it. Thanks to reader Jannette who commented that is called Bento Box. You can find the pattern for it here – Bento Box.

The pantograph is called Halcyon by Willow Leaf Studios.

Rolled up for the next pass, all was going well.

Rolling and ...