Quilters By the Sea Guild October Meeting -- Natalia Bonner

There are always a lot of charitable quilts made by this group and this week there was a lot of the quilts that are made for Habitat for Humanity.  They were all bright and colorful and wonderful!!  I am always surprised in this Guild by the fact that so many people leave after the program and don't stay for Show and Tell which is always my favorite!

Our speaker this month was Natalia Bonner who is an author and quilter who publishes with C & T Publishing and has a couple of books out --  one on one block quilts and the other on beginning machine quilting.  She is really charming and accomplished for someone so young.  Most of the female members of her extended family are quilters and she works with her mother a great deal.

I won't even attempt to picture all the quilts she showed which were all published in one of her two books.  Her third book on a modern interpretation of log cabin blocks is due out soon.

This and the  previous quilt were in her machine quilting book.  She uses a lot of solids because the shelf life of printed fabrics is so short and people inevitably want the exact fabrics when they are using the patterns from the books.  Using mostly solids or solid substitutes eliminates this problem.  It is also indicative of the "modern quilt" movement which uses lots and lots of background.

This was a really cute applique quilt.  She does machine applique with heavily starched pieces and a blanket stitch to hold the pieces down with the free use of washable glue to hold them in place.

The remainder of the quilts were from her second book on one block quilts.  This looked like fun!

All the quilts in the second book are in three sizes with detailed instructions.

This was a fun one and one of many where it is hard to find the basic block!

Our program person Miranda holding up another of the quilts where it is hard to find the block.

A really really simple block but I thought with some tweaking that it would be a great way to showcase some of my marbled fabrics.

This was my very very favorite of all and so simple!!  I am definitely going to add this to my scrappy quilts repertoire.  

I am making progress (albeit slowly as this is a more complex block than it appears).  It will be fun to do the machine quilting in this one I think!