Invitations to quarterly guild meeting

Our provincial guild  consists of roughly 17 smaller groups from all over our province and once every three months all of us get together for our quarterly guild meeting.  In between these, the smaller groups gather as many or few times as they wish at different locations.

Card back (closed)

The smaller groups are divided into pairs and the two selected groups should then work together to host a quarterly meeting.  For the August 2011 meeting the Saturday group   I belong to is one of the host groups and it is then our job to rent the venue, decorate the hall, make the snacks, make gifts to hand at our the door, serve tea and clean up afterwards.  However before that we had to make invitation to give to all the group leaders of each group and this is where I was involved.

Card front (closed)

I saw this neat pattern for a greeting card but trying to be clever I wanted to make it with quilting fabric never thinking that it might not be as easy as it looked.  Luckily our local PFAFF dealer is part of this group too.  So teamwork it was, I gave the fabric and cut the patterns, she sewed all together and did the dreaded satin stitching and then back to me to do the iron-on printing on the inside.

Card back (open)

Card inside

Eliminating all the swear words that went into this process I think it came out really good and seeing that all the

 group leaders received their invitations on Monday, 18 April, I think it is save to post these pictures to my blog.

I’ve been working on so many ‘secret’ projects lately that I couldn’t really do any blog posts until the due dates of these projects.  Apart from about 3 more such secretive projects (that I can recall now) I think I’m done and should be able to get back to regular blog postings.

Deadlines just don’t do it

Friend and quilt buddy Karin and I decided to enter the challenge for our National Quilt Festival .  Not that we think we’re all that good but after 10-years of quilting we figured we earned the right to a decent crit by a panel of judges. We had an artist in our midst (my blonde’s boyfriend) so finding the designs were the easy part.  However then the snail got onto the razor blade; plenty of slime secretion (us talking about our challenges) but little forward movement. 

Suddenly the two of us found ourselves stuck.  We used to quilt day and night, are known for our impulsive all night quilting sessions and we didn’t and couldn’t do a thing the moment the challenge became our priority

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We knew we had to do something about this and SOON too as our quilts should be couriered in about two weeks time, so we retreated to familiarity and planned yet another all night quilt session.  We decided to ‘invite’ the two men for the earlier part of the night to start us off with a decent barbeque before we got stuck through the night.

Here Karin shows how a quilter should await dinner while the men ‘cook’.

Unfortunately while waiting for the food, I first made us lovely cocktails and soon afterwards helped the men finish a good bottle (okay two) of red wine.  Needless to say we got friendlier but more tired and when the men wanted to go to bed at 11pm we seriously doubted our abilities to continue.

Karin took this photo of me and the flat hair...... I had a Brazilian blow wave and for the next 12 weeks I should not have a curl, frizz or kink in my head.  I am not too chuffed with having my head all flat and even Karin’s comment that I’d get used to it, didn’t help much as even with me getting used to it, doesn’t change the fact that it will still be way too flat to my liking. 

At exactly 23:30 the first needle pierced through fabric and we seriously started sewing until 6 am the next morning.  We actually moved forward - hooray!!

I got done with the final quilting of my quilt the next day and now just need to do the binding and final finishes and word from Karin says she too is making good progress but here she can be seen seriously unpicking.

We might just make it!!