Quilters by the Sea January Meeting - Part 1

Our speaker this month was Katherine Carter who lives here in Wilmington.  She is a super high energy person who primarily makes memory quilts for other people.  Her Facebook page is www.facebook.com/Katsbags.  She obviously gets lots of customers as she is booked out a year in advance and makes about 100 quilts a year!!  Her business is called Kat's Out of the Bag!

This is just one of the quilts she has made.

This is another one!

A really fun part of the meeting was the showing of many of the Cape Fear River challenge quilts submitted by members.  The following are about half of them and you may remember my one of the sunset at Ft. Fisher which I posted before.  These were just stunning quilts and am constantly amazed that our relatively small guild has so many talented and creative art quilters!

 

Farmer's Wife Quilts Almost Done!!

This is th e quilt from the Farmer's Wife 30s book.I felt like I have been machine quilting forever but it appears to be done with both quilts!  If I had the patience, I would have done some quilting in all those white spaces but didn't!  I like the colors in this one better than the purple one even though I don't usually enjoy working on my blue quilts even though it is one of my favorite colors!

I only have to put borders and binding on the purple one and  binding on this one as I am not doing borders.  This one has 90 blocks and is smaller than the other one so I could actually get a halfway decent picture of it on my design walls.  It is about 80 x 72.  

I have updated this piost to incude the almost finished purple quilt which now has borders on it.  I have the binding (just a darker shade of purple) ready to attach and then I  will handsew down!
 

-Farmer's Wife 20's Quilt Almost Done

If you read my blog, you remember me doing these blocks around this time last year.  Well, I finally managed to get them put together this summer and have been working the last two weeks on getting the three sections machine quilted which I finally got done this week.  The quilt is currently about 110 x 90 in so pretty good sized.  After putting the three sections together, I will add a small border of purple and then call it quits!  This picture does not include all the blocks as I can't get far away from my too small design wall to get a complete shot!

This is a rather poor picture that shows it altogether but still doesn't show the whole quilt.  I am in the process now of sewing the seams in the back down where the sections go together.  This is so simple fete as this quilt is large and very heavy as I used cotton instead of my usual wool.  The sad part is that I think this quilt is too big for out quilt club show or even to bring in for 
"show and tell" down here!  It will be about the right size for one of the three king sized beds that I have between here and Rochester!

Next to work on the 1930's Farmer's Wife quilt which has fewer blocks and only two sections but is still pretty good sized as there are 90 blocks in it!
 

Oh No. More Quilt as You Go!

Well, first I have to show you a piece of fabric I fell in love with and am pondering what to use it for!  The repeat is 36 inches which is very large for fabric like this and I only have a piece that is 40 x 108.  It was a gift from my sister, who, I might add, is a very bad influence on me!  I visited her in Florida last week and the first day, she suggested we visit a local quilt shop that was in its last week of going out of business!!  Everything was 75% off and even me, who has sworn off buying any more fabric, succumbed and bought a couple of smallish pieces of purple (my weakness) and a whole bolt of a green leafy grassy print.  When it is less than $3/yd, who can resist?  As it turned out, I bought as a backing for one of the two Farmer's Wife sampler quilts but it is perfect for both of them and there will only be a scrap left when I got it for them!  

Then I mentioned to my sister that I was getting low on purples and greens, so she dragged out two boxes of purples and let me have whatever I wanted!!  More purple and green quilts in my future.  I should note that my sister used to make quilts for Hoffman and got lots of batiks in return!

Here is another qayg baby quilt and I still have a lot of the center strip fabric left so there will be more.  Actually  using up some of my lightly dyed lavender fabric in these!

Here is the back.  Like the front, I chose the lighter of my strips which I don't use in the larger "stained glass" quilts.

This is probably the last one using the darker blue strips.  I do  have some yardage of a lighter set of blue strips so may use thosee.

This is the back of the above quilt. These are so fast to make!

I have proceeded to start putting together the Farmer's Wife quilts, starting with the "20s" version which is puples, greens, yellows and a smattering of blue.  It is in 3 sections and I have spray basted 2 sections so far and will get the third done today and maybe get started on the 30's version which is mainly blues and greens.  Of course both have beige/white components as well.  Both will look great with the green fabric I bought and I am so glad to find a use for for the whole bolt so quickly.  It assuages my guilt a little!

After that, I am going to make a "Quilts of Valor" quilt.  Our current Guild president gave a presentation in November on this program as I was very, very impressed with the care that goes into giving these quilts.  I picked up some blue patriotic fat quarters that she had for working on them and have been searching for  patterns that I like and have found 3 or 4 that I liked.  It might be awhile as the machine quilting on the FW quilts won't be quick!  Hopefully, they will turn out good enough that I can enter them into the Rochester club show in May.


 

Two More Finished!

Everyone seems to want larger quilts these days for "comfort" quilts so I added this sashing to make it about 56 x 78.  Now just to baste, machine quilt, add borders and bind.  I have used hand dyed fabrics for all the solids as i don't ever buy solids anymore.  Can't seem to find the picture of the fabric that this was made from.

And here it is completed.  I like the grey/blue binding I put on it, matching the background of one set of blocks.

I found some major yardage of more strip sets that were much lighter in color and decided I could do baby quilts with this colorway, choosing a lighter color for the sashing and only using lighter colored strips.  I hadn't known what to do with all those light colored strips as I use them sparingly in the "stained blass" looking quilts.  Seems to work here.  I was also selective in the prints I chose for the back.

This is the back.  The white looking block has musical notes all over it.  It is difficult to get the backs and fronts to both look well placed!

I will be working on the last of the "stained glass" quilts tomorrow and use up the remainder of those strips.  It was a tight squeeze to find enough to finish a 40 x 60 in quilt but I did!  I have enough of the lighter strips to make several more baby quilts.

 

Challenge Quilt Done!

I thought I was done machine quilting when I got this far but decided that you couldn't see the reeds in the foreground at the bottom without standing 2 inches away from the quilt so another day of quilting!

And here it is, trimmed to the proper size.  It had to be between 36 and 30 inches high and 24 to 30 inches wide.  I originally made it about 45 by 40 so I could trim it down when I finished the quilting and decided how much of the ocean in front to show.

The top of the challenge was the Cape Fear River which runs behind Wilmington (and me in Kure Beach even closer) and meets up with the ocean at Ft. Fisher.  There is a historic breakwater separating the two at the tip of Ft. Fisher.  I took a picture overlooking the breakwater and a striking sunset several years ago.  (There were a lot of fires west of that year and really colored the sunsets.)

The piece had to feature the Cape Fear River and that is the middle blue piece on the other side of the breakwater.

I took some liberties with the photo in constructing this quilt!  It now sits at a comfortable 36 inches by 29 inches.  I am in the processing of sewing the facing and the triangles I have to put in the corner of the back for hanging at the exhibit.  I am hoping it is not too much too different from the rest of the pieces.  I seem to be very different in my approaches with a lot more color (like my camellias that I did for the last show).

The exhibit will be at the Burgwin-Wright house in Wilmington between Feb. 23 and Mar 17 in 2024.

I happened down to Carolina Beach Lake one very cloudy day last week but was rewarded with quite a few birds -- some that I hadn't seen for awhile.  There was a flock of these Bluebirds sitting on the lines.

There were several Dunlins and they were still there the next time I went by.  Most of the time, you couldn't see their bills as they were buried in the muck!

A Kildeer and he was also hanging around the next time I went.

Not as impressive a speciies to sight, but there was a huge flock of these Starlings and I do like their winter plummage.

This is a Lesser Scaup, a bird I haven't seen at the lake in a couple of years at least!  They used to be there all winter.

I did finish another one of the QAYG quilts although not quite done in this photo.  I have enough pieces of the blue stripes to do one more and it is in my bag waiting to go to the next "Open Sew" we have.

 

More Comfort Quilts and Challenge Quilt Beginning!

 

These next three quilts are all for our guild's Habitat for Humanity donations.

This and the next quilt were originally to be a king-sized quilt but I just didn't need another king-sized quilt and wasn't all that crazy about them either so I decided to go with 2 twin sized quilts that I will donate.  They are each about 45 x 90 so would go great in some shelter.

Another comfort quilt with the blue stripe fabric and blocks made several years ago when teaching some ladies how to do a "disappearing 9-patch".

I managed to get 17 blocks of the QAYG type done at our sewing day on Monday.  My back may never be the same so will have to bring a pillow to back me up the next time!

I have started the challenge quilt which will be for a show in 2024 at one of the historic houses in Wilmington.  The theme of the challenge is the Cape Fear River.  I frequently photo sunset scenes down at Ft. Fisher so decided that is what I would use for the challenge.  I like the ones I take through the trees the best but wasn't up to tackling the trees so decided to go with a picture taken at sunset looking out from the very end of Ft. Fisher.  The view shows the historic breakwater that was built in the mid 1800s and it separates the Cape Fear River from the ocean.  

This was the beginning of the sunset.  I struggled to find some of the exact colors I wanted to use.

Here are all the layers of the background sunset and it looks very bright and overwhelming to me here.  I am making everything oversized at this point as the final piece has to measure 30-36 inches tall and 24 - 30 inches wide.  I am cuttently skirting around 36 inches tall and 30 inches wide.

This is my current iteration of the piece where I have  cut off some of the top.  

The further black line is the opposite shore and the blue between the two black lines is the Cape Fear River. The closer black area is of course the breakwater which is pretty flat on top but craggy on the bottom.

The foreground is the inlet of the ocean.  There will also be scattered reeds which I will machine quilt coming up from the bottom of the piece.

I haven't decided yet whether I will do some painting as well as the machine quilting I will be doing.  

I am feeling like I am on the right track now and have some time to get this done as it doesn't have to be finished until January.  My biggest fear is that it will be too different from anyone else's and just won't fit in.