Sarah Hibbert Workshop

Sunday I had a blast in a workshop with Sarah Hibbert. The workshop - Freestyle Patchwork - was all about play. In the morning, I worked on the piece Sarah and I are holding. the idea was to start sewing together squares and rectangles, choosing the pieces somewhat blindly, and see what develops. I want to make the piece a bit bigger and hope it will eventually live on a wall in my bedroom. Since I am working on a new quilt for that bed - see those blocks - I used scraps of blue.

In the afternoon we worked on a different piece where you started with a odd sized scrap - i.e. not a perfect square or rectangle - and then built the piece up from there. I used many of the same scraps as the first piece but ran out of time to make the piece larger.

Sarah is a wonderful teacher - I would highly recommend taking one of her workshops. She told a whole bunch of fun stories and shared lots of tips. She also brought some linen scraps and generously shared them with us. (There are some of her linen scraps in the first piece.)

Sarah will be back in Raleigh for QuiltCon and I look forward to seeing her again!

Have a wonderful day! Patty

Shine Improv Blocks

I am a new member of the @unscriptedquiltsbee. 

This block for May was requested by Ellyn @ellynz. We were asked to make improv blocks that represent the work Shine using a specific color palette. Ellyn sent us Kona Lagoon to include in our blocks to help unify them.

My two larger blocks are roughly 10" x 10" and there is a 6"x 10" and 5" x 5".

You can see the March block  and the April block.

There are a total of eleven members of the bee. My month is June and I am so excited to send out my prompt.

Have a wonderful day! Patty

Double Wedding Ring Blocks are done!

I am very excited that all 63 of my double wedding ring blocks are done!

I started these blocks during a guild retreat with the expectation that I could finish them during the actual retreat. That didn't happen - no real surprise there! - but I methodically worked through them and they are now done.

I used these templates and overcut the blocks to allow for better accuracy after trimming. Fabric placement was tricky but the plan is to have different fabrics come together in the 4-patch.

My plan is to actually set these with sashing to remove all those bulky seams coming together. This will be a queen sized bed quilt when complete.

For now, I am putting the quilt aside to work on another project. The next step for these blocks is a really good pressing and trimming.

Before I started on these blocks, I practiced with my Pantone challenge entry - Orange Overload!

Have a wonderful day! Patty

Guild Retreat 2025

My guild - Triangle MQG - tried something new last weekend - a 'sleep in your own bed retreat'. In the past, we rented a room at a hotel at the beach about a 2 hr drive away. This year, we rented a large space associated with a fabric store and held our retreat there. (That's me standing up on the bottom right.)

Everything went so well - even with a 90 minute power outage after a large storm blew through! We had pizza Friday night, ice cream Saturday afternoon and plenty of junk food all the rest of the time!

My goal for the weekend was to get 63 double wedding ring blocks pieced. Turns out, this was far too optimistic - isn't that always the way with retreat sewing? Instead of 63 complete blocks, I managed to sew 39 partial blocks - leaving the last seam which required some accuracy to line up seams for home.

It took awhile to get in the grove but one I started laying out the block pieces for a row ahead of time I was able to speed up the process. That said, I got too confident towards the end and started piecing the blocks without pinning. That just meant there were some misaligned blocks to fix when I got home!

In addition to the blocks, I finished the last bits of my tchotchke block requested by bee mate @feltlikesweets - read more.

 Besides the sewing, there was much laughter and new friendships formed. And, as I said, there was ice cream!

Have a wonderful day! Patty