Quilting Design for HMQS Display

I designed three different feather blocks and a feather border. The white block feather is also in the center square. The little black square motif is in the border corners and is also repeated in the four corners of the center square. These are formal feathers so I have to backtrack. The extra work is worth it because they are such pretty feathers. For the triangles I will do parallel lines and maybe in the outside border as well.

Fabric comes next. Like I said earlier, I'm doing this project backwards.

Designing a Quilt for HMQS

I have been working on a new quilt for the teacher display at HMQS in May. Usually quilters select the pattern and fabric, piece the quilt, and then figure out the quilting design. Since my focus is on machine quilting I'm doing it backwards. I want feathers and lots of them so I need the piecing to be simple with large open areas.

Although I like these blocks and they look great with borders, the feather designs I have in mind are not triangles and the pieces are still relatively small.

The block on the left is a little too plain but the Federal Square block on the right works. One decision made - check back to see the feather quilting design!

Introduction to Machine Quilting Class

Village Dry Goods and I teamed to do a local workshop prior to HMQS.  Our Introduction to Machine Quilting class was too big for the shop so we met in the fire station kitchen (the large meeting room was scheduled with important political meetings.)

It was a little crazy with 15 quilters learning the basics but I love to see the excitement as students figure out that they can free motion quilt.

When quilters get together we make connections.  During introductions I discovered the mother of my son-in-law's business partner was in the class!

We often have a machine or two which do not want to cooperate but we can usually coax them into working with a few adjustments. In this class we had Singer, Bernina, Phaff, Viking, Brother, and Janome machines. One students decided it was time to replace an ancient Singer and another said the $100 box store machine had to go. Did you notice the wood extension table a nice husband made?