Quilting By Design

The Flying Geese Quilt Guild in Bel Air, Maryland offers a couple of free patterns for making charity quilts and pillow cases for woulded vets and cancer patients. These patterns can be found on the Flying Geese Quilt Guild Web site.

charity quilts, cancer pillowcases, Flying Geese quilt guild

Pictures of my dyeing . Pictures of failed attempts at patchwork. Pictures of what looks like it will work.

Here’s a picture of the first square I’ve made for the winter quilt, as well as other unsucessful patches for other things. I’ll use them though- waste not want not.
As you can see, the orange block looks flower-like. I based the block on a 6 inch snowball pattern. I made the snowball of yellow fabric. Then I added layers of folded orange fabric squares from the center out( sort of like doing a crazy quilt technique)
As long as the folded fabric overlaps the base edges, I can catch all the raw edges of all layers when I stitch around the entire perimeter of the snow ball. I then cut off any excess and add the four corner triangles to the snow ball flower to fininsh with a 6 inch square again.
And there it is, a crazy patach looking flower that does not have to be pieced as all the overlapping edges of the petals are folded edges. This gives the block 3 D interest and incidentally makes forming the patch very fast.

By using a 6 inch block , I could use 5 and 6 inch charm squares to form the petals. This is radiply putting a dent in to my stash.

patchwork, patch, patches, snowball, charm quilt, quilt

I’ve been drawing, I’ve been gathering patches, I’ve been clearing a table, I’ve moved the sewing machine, I’m set, hep and ready to go on my newest quilt. So what am I really doing? I’m dyeing a jacket.
My daughter has a wonderful black jacket with red embroidery she’s worn for 2 years straight. So now the black is more a charcoal grey and not so good looking. I thought that re-dying the entire jacket in black would be a bad idea since the embroidery would be lost. But re-dyeing it red would deepen the grey to , well something closer to black while revitalizing the embroidery.
I’m boiling the jacket on the stove. My kitchen looks like something out of a haunted house, red liquid and unidetifyable black stuff in the pot, red drips everywhere….
What we don’t do for our kiddies.
On a different note, I’ve been researching quilting on the web looking for ideas for the stash and found a set of really interesting articles and pictures on Dutch patchwork. There was a brief explosion of Dutch women making “Celebration” or Festival skirts out of old fabrics saved from before the war. There were instructions on how to make these and a registry for them. I’m attaching thel inks since they tell the story better than I ever could. Neat stuff.

patchwork quilt, quilting, quilts, charm

Not all of these are copyrighted but some are, so be kind

Free Garden Quilt Patterns