Saturday Stitching

Most Saturdays, many of the girls who attended classes at our shop, meet at the Aspect school in Albury. Saturday was our first day back for the year and there was standing room only.
We have two challenges this year, first is to finish the top of a major UFO, and second to bring along a 2kg bag of fabric from our stash( anything and any size) and we would pool it, sort it out and then we will each get back a 2kg bag of fabric.
The fabric will be hidden in a brown paper bag, and once we open it, we can swap the entire bag with someone else's bag, but we cannot swap individual fabrics. All we are allowed to add is up to 2 metres of one other fabric. At the end of the year we have to bring back a finished quilt top, but not show anyone through the year.

So on Saturday we had bags and bags of fabric, and yesterday Christine and I sorted it out. We had one pile for donation to the girls who make quilts for the orphanage in Nepal , and we packed the rest into 2kg lots, sorting it out to useable lots. Tomorrow will be the beginning of the great challenge, when we start handing them out.

Last Saturday, we saw what most girls were finishing in the UFO challenge

Beth is finishing her Trundle quilt. This is a major project, a quilt designed by Karen Cunningham, with tiny little sampler blocks all around.

Christine and Bridget and Bridgitte looking gobsmacked as Beth holds up her UFO.

Christine is completing her machine pieced, very complicated frame quilt "Remember Me". This is a quilt I taught many years ago. It is a reproduction of the Charlotte Gambold quilt from Everton. Everton is about 1/2 hour from where I live, and my husband's grandparents are both from that area. The original quilt appears in the book on Australian quilts by Margaret Rolfe.

There are a few Swan Lake aka"Dancing Dollies" quilts to be completed this year

and a few "Little Garden" quilts, another quilt designed by Karen.

and a few Irish Circles quilts.

A few of the girls have grandchildren on the way, our first baby of the year was born this week. Ruby Matilda arrived on Tuesday. So it will be a happy but busy year.

And I think these two stories are more than worthy of a mention. Sarah completed her hand quilted quilt for her son Alexander. She was having nightmares that she would die and he would be the only child without his quilt. Alexander is 16 years old, and Sarah finished the quilt. Fortunately it has been a cool summer! 

Joy completed her embroidered baby blanket for her daughter Emma. Emma is now 14 years old, and loved getting her blanket, whereas if she had it when she was a baby, she couldn't have cared less, and as Joy said, probably would have just been sick on it.