Liz visited from NZ

 Today, while Liz was staying with me before returning to NZ, I called a pop-up sewing day.

Glenda and Elaine came and between us all we now have two quilts tacked ready to be quilted.

When the orphan block quilt was tacked we put it on the design wall to work out where the embellishments would go. It is looking good.

The other quilt ready for quilting is Elaine's pretty flowers but I do not have a photo of it or Elaine.

Elaine also labelled the Broken Dishes quilt and that is now ready to be claimed by anyone who would like it.

Our first Orphan Block construction

 Elaine and I have played with ideas for the first orphan block collection we started on Saturday. The top is now constructed but there are lots of add-ons to be placed in some of the bare places.

And of course a border or two.

Elaine's Cat quilt

 Elaine backed this  with a blanket she found at an op shop for $3 that was exactly the right size.

Very effective and a great border too.

August gathering

 Quite a crowd attended either in person or on zoom and lots of fun was had by all. Glenda, Karen, Kathryn, Stephanie and Elaine came to share the day in my funny house almost prepared for renos. There was some difficulty finding where everything is now stored. 

Our first activity was a bit of show and tell from Elaine...

... and Karen.

Then it was time to put together our pretty flowers applique blocks and decide how to enlarge the quilt top and choose some borders.

We settled on a peeper of purple then using the remaining blue fabric as the final border.

Because I have so many orphan blocks now accumulated in my stash last week I had started putting up my red/white/blue ones to make a top and filling the gaps with 2.5" squares in red/white/blue. 

I then suggested to others that were attending in person to bring their orphan blocks and perhaps we could sort them into colour themes and put them together. A collection I had sorted were all pale and really seem to go together well. Elaine took home one Dresden Plate block and some backing to applique it onto which accounts for the large gap. We searched my stash for other small pieces of fabric that could also be fillers where needed.

While we were sorting orphan blocks we created collections of green/brown ...

... and colourful multicoloured pieces that would go together.

It was interesting trying to sort and the big lesson learned was not to overthink it because by using the right assortment with added frames and fillers to make things fit, the colours do work together if the colour choices are broad.

We'll see what comes of these.

At 3pm we had our zoom with Heather, Jenny, and Jeanette. It was then that we noticed Jeanette's quilt in the previous post below.

What an amazing creative lot we are! 

Jeanette's colourful quilt

 As seen on Zoom...

Sorry I was so long getting this photo online Jeanette.