Cove Quilters Challenge #4

The Cove Quilters have been busy again with our 4th challenge. So far we have done Birds, Candy, Paint and now this one is Books. There are 8 of us participating. Each challenge is 12" square and we can use any techniques we wish. The idea was to encourage us to try techniques we hadn't used before but just completing it is challenge enough for me, especially this one.

My "Sew Little Time" - we were suppose to pick a favorite book, I had too many to chose from so I decided to do something quick and making up book titles from selvedges I had saved. No hand stitching on this one, it is machine pieced and quilted! I have posted photos the other members of the Cove Quilters in my Flickr Photostream. We have entered all 32 challenges in the MBQG Quilt Show. It will be great to see them all together. Our next theme is "Stars" - I already have a plan, I think it will be paper pieced. That will be a challenge for me!

It has been a busy summer and I needed to come up with something quickly as I was swamped with trying to finish hand quilting Molly's quilt (it is done!) for our Mahone Bay QG Quilt Show in a couple of weeks. Plus I had my Guild challenge to finish, company came and went several times.

My Guild challenge "Blessings" - a table runner, I used all 5 challenge fabrics and added 3 of my own. It was quick and fun to do. Another machine pieced and machine quilted project. I think it is time to get back to some hand work!

Musing on Age or...Where Are The "Young" Quilters?

A couple of weeks ago I happened upon a blog post by Krista Hennebury at PoppyPrint titled "Old Ladies Know Stuff". I was intrigued by the title and was even more intrigued as I read her post. Finally, someone is writing about what I have been thinking for several years. Not just that "old ladies (quilters) know stuff" but the concern I have with the age of the members at my 2 Guilds. There is hardly a member under 50! Where are all the young quilters and why are they not coming out to our Guild meetings and workshops? 

I was teaching at Quilt Canada in Halifax a month ago and before I went I wondered if there would be a "young" contingent of quilters there. Would there be any "young" ones at the Canadian Quilters Association's AGM? The short answer is "no"...very few that I saw and I did my best to be aware of who was around in my classes, at the shows and at the merchant mall. I am sure money was a big part of it because it was expensive to attend the conference and workshops etc but there were shows that cost very little to get into and the merchant mall was free to get in. It is a puzzle and one I think Guilds and our national Canadian Quilters Association needs to address or all we "Old Ladies" have worked for in the past 40 years will go down the drain!

There are those who say that the "young" are busy, they work full time, they have young kids - but wait a minute, so did I, so did a lot of the other "old ladies who quilt" I know and we managed to take time for ourselves, start guilds, teach workshops, have quilt shows and raise our family and work outside the home. I have always said that I am lucky I started quilting when I did, my family grew up with my quilting, they learned along with me and they all helped out. I also started quilting when all I needed was a basic sewing machine, some fabric, scissors and sand paper for templates. The simple life, no "designer" fabrics, no quilting machines, no rotary cutters, very few books and one magazine "Quilter's Newsletter". How far we have come!

My main Guild, the Mahone Bay Quilters Guild, is trying to move ahead with the times. We are on Facebook, we have a blog, we have made every effort to make our business meetings short and sweet. We are having interesting and exciting programs at our meetings and we are going out of our way to welcome visitors and guests. We need to do this to ensure that our Guild will survive.

My other Guild, the Mayflower QG has a Quilters Retreat every two years, 2013 will be our 14th! We have established the "Avonport Award" a scholarship for a young quilter who is under 40 and is a resident of NS.

Kelly (2011) and Krystal (2009), our first two Avonport Scholarship winners.

Thanks to the generosity of Avonport Discount Fabrics and several other anonymous donors we offer a full, all expense paid scholarship to to young quilter. They have to apply and there is a jury who decides (anonymously) on a deserving quilter. We all benefit from our scholarship winners being at the Retreat, we love their enthusiasm, we love being able to share our skills and knowledge.

Krista has some great points about traditional guilds and what they have to offer. Sometimes I wish there weren't labels like "traditional" or "modern" or "quilt art". We could all learn so much from each other if we would just get over the labels and be quilters, do what our Grandmothers did and share our patterns and our skills.

My bee, The Piecemakers, taken a few years ago at our annual Christmas party and dinner. Sadly, four of our members have died and we miss them all but we have new members, younger members who we have welcomed and we enjoy each others company so much. We range in age from 50 something to ninety plus and we have been together for over 30 years! Quilts are still being made, some knitting is getting done and we do our best to solve the world's problems! We talk about books and movies, quilt patterns and quilt shows.

So, I encourage my quilt friends to go out and find someone who is interested in our craft, bring them to a Guild meeting and more importantly share your knowledge and enthusiasm with them.

Catching Up Again

Life seems to be a lot of catching up these days! Hard to believe that I have been home from Quilt Canada for almost 2 weeks. It has been a whirlwind of a couple of weeks too!

Quilt Canada was great! Thanks to the Local Organizing Committee headed up by Karen Henry and the workshop organizers Deanne Hemphill and Fiona Oxford.

Deanne managing her phone and her camera, a quilter of many talents!

My classes were great and I seemed to have students from across Canada, Newfoundland to the Northwest Territories and everywhere in between as well as Wales and the US!

High level of concentration in my Stab Stitch quilting workshop.

Learning to hand piece the Waternish Star, oh those tiny pieces!

Hand appliqueing Running Around in Circles.

It was great to see some familiar faces from past Quilt Canada's too. I was especially glad to spend some time with Kay Phillips and Nina Stahlsmicht.

Nina specializes in all things feed sack!

It was interesting being back at Dalhousie University, my alma mater. There were times when floods of memories came back and I just had to stop and remember and enjoy those great times. 

My only regret was there wasn't time to get together with the other teachers, I think I managed to speak to about half of them! I felt badly too as one of the NS teachers that we couldn't properly welcome our visiting teacher who came from across Canada, the US and the UK. Maybe next time!

After QC, Heather Stewart stayed on for a 5 day visit with us. Heather (from ON) is a member of the MBQG and comes to NS whenever she can. We had a great time visiting Avonport Discount Fabrics, our favourite lunch spot the Port Pub, our guild closing pot luck dinner and AGM and a lunch with our bee, the Cove Quilters. 

Thanks to my friend Cheryl Hughes in England we were able to decorate the table for the Queen's Diamond Jubilee, had I thought of it earlier we could have had a lovely tiara as a centre piece!

Linda, Sandra, Sandy, Jane and Heather.

Thanks to everyone for their contributions, we had a delicious lunch!

Heather reveals her challenge, house paint with handpainted fabrics. Note her fascinator she is wearing, made by Linda Mills!

We had another reveal day for our bee 12x12 challenge. This was a challenge for many this time and everyone came through with flying colours! The theme was house paint. Everyone received 2 paint chips which were randomly chosen and had to use those to be inspired using the theme house paint, paint the town or painted ladies.

Top row, left to right - Heather, Linda H, Sandra; middle row - Linda M and Vicki; bottom row - Sandy, Barb and Donna.

We are entering our all our challenges in our MBQG Quilt Show September 27-30, 2013. The challenge will be just how to hang/show them? The next challenge is to be inspired by a favourite book, That is a tough one as there are so many! Those will be revealed in September in time for the Quilt Show at the end of the month.