Quilt Raffle Winner!!

Today was the big day of the quilt raffle draw! I was set up at the Farmer's Market by 9am, sold another 60 or so tickets before 1pm which brought me to a grand total of $1565 raised, awesome!

My display at the Farmer's Market - I managed to get the same wonderful spot again, right by the entrance!

Good thing I started folding the 900+ tickets early, it took about 2 hrs and a young woman from the cheese booth next to me helped out :) (she also took all the photos that have me in it)

A lot of tickets...

The manager of the market, Roger, agreed to draw the winner at 1pm. Here he is shaking the tickets up.

No peeking while he drew the winner

Here it comes... Roger drawing the winner of the raffle quilt

And the winner is... someone named Angela, who according to my records bought her tickets at the market 3 weeks ago. I can't believe someone I don't know won the quilt, after so many of my tickets were bought by people I know! I can't believe that our former summer student, bought 100$ worth of tickets, didn't win the the quilt!

A shot for the memory book!

Calling the winner with the good news... I got an answering machine!

So hopefully, I can track Angela down soon and get the quilt to her! I feel bad for all the nice people (known and unknown to me) who bought tickets but I'm very happy to send 3x more money than I had hoped to Doctors Without Borders on Monday!

I've updated the Raffle Quilt blog if you want to see the final progress of my fundraising!

I'm not sure what to do with my life now... I have no more tickets to sell, I feel lost. Oh well, as soon as I get home the cardboard boxes will remind me of what to do with my life :)

Woot Woot!

Hey all - great news! I'm up to 503$ raised by selling raffle tickets for the Disaster Relieve Quilt for Doctors Without Borders! I started selling on February 16th, so I'm stunned that I reached my goal (500$) so quickly.

This photos was taken at my guild meeting the night I started selling - here you can finally see my unusual borders :)

You can read more about the story behind those borders here and more about the benefit raffle here!

Updates

Thought it was time for a miscellaneous update post...

Raffle Quilt
First off, if any of you are interested, tickets for my quilt guild's (Kindred Spirit Quilt Guild of Charlottetown, PEI) raffle quilt are now on sale for 2$ each or 3 for 5$ (or 30 for 50$ as I like to advertise *grins*).


If any of you are really interested in this quilt (it's King sized, about 8.5 feet square, is my estimate - I'm standing there holding one corner, my arm is up above my head and you still have the overhang past the stage. A long-arm quilter is quilting it right now, and detailed photos of individual blocks are in this post), we can figure out how I could get you some tickets - if you're outside my general travel route, shipping would be an additional cost.

Everyone is also invited to our Guild Quilt Show, held Sep 24-26 in Charlottetown (quilt will be raffled off at the show)! PEI is a beautiful place that time of year... maybe worth a visit???


President's Challenge
Next Wednesday is the day of the President's Challenge at the quilt guild, it's amazing how long excitement will last! ;) I'm planning on taking lots of pictures of the other entries!


Spring Quilt
What else have I been up to? Well, I've been quilting on the spring quilt - came up with a design for the white sashing - between that and the loops on the blue-green leave squares, there's enough quilting on this quilt to hold it together ;) Ready for binding!


Free As A Bird Quilt
I'm ITCHING to keep working on the Free As A Bird Quilt...


However, I have run out of grey fabric for reasons that will be revealed later ;) Remember, this quilt will not look like this in the end!
It's driving me crazy to not have enough fabric to keep going when I really want to be working on this quilt! I'm trying to match the shade of grey right now, as the original store (Fabricville/land of all places!) doesn't have that grey anymore... I'm going to try the Nova Scotia Fabricville next month, hopefully they still have this solid stocked, it's usually one of those staples, but the manager of the local store is as always a pain in the butt with vague answers like "Maybe we get it in again, maybe not, we're not sure". It's a solid grey fabric, it's like having butter and sugar and flour in the house :)
The little patch below is the only grey carried at my local Fabricville these days, and I tried another fabric store and they barely had ANY solids, that was a bit embarrassing, I thought ;)


Sunrise Wallhanging
And lastly, the curved piecing wall hanging embellishments...


I'm really not that happy with the beads, apart from the red ones. I'm thinking of taking the others off and adding some quilting instead! It's on the back burner...


Speaking about the back, mwahaha, here's the back of the wall hanging - all you see are the seams holding down the bias binding, the zigzagging is done on the muslin foundation on the front.


I have also been helping a friend with a quilt she's making, but it's secret because I don't know if the quilt's recipient is reading this blog...

That's what's keeping me busy, and you???

Raffle Quilt Top Complete!

One of the highlights of the jamboree was that we got to see the completed raffle quilt top! Isn't it stunning???


Here are some detail shots of the wonderful blocks!


This is one of the three blocks I contributed:



I like the blue one!


This one looks crazy - I didn't make one of these, just the new york beauty and a traditionally pieced one.

Another favourite of mine:

I made this one, too! It was my first one! Progress posted about here.


I like this one, too:


I'm just so utterly amazed that more than 20 different quilters made blocks, with all their different 1/4" seams, because they do differ! And somehow all those blocks fit together into this quilt top! I did hear a few blocks had to be ironed to death to stretch or be redone, but still, very impressive!!

The quilt will be quilted by a long-arm quilter in town and raffled off at this fall's quilt show.

*** Remember that the give-away is still open! See last post ;) ***

Another Raffle Block

Back in November (?) I learned how to paper-piece and do curved piecing at my quilt retreat, but I forgot to take pictures of the block in my momentary ecstasy! But I've volunteered to make a second block, same pattern, for the same quilt, and this time, I took a photo :)


Well, it was fun to do another block, though I almost forgot how to do the thing! I don't think I'd do a whole quilt in this pattern...

Addendum: for really CRAZY yet impressive paper-piecing, check out this wonky log cabin block Zonnah made, and then check out what she's planning to do with it... I basically commented that I think she's crazy but that the quilt will be great ;)

My Retreat Accomplishments

I managed to get quite a few blocks done for another quilt with a deadline. This one needs to be ready before Christmas and I'm on schedule so far. It's a modified log cabin with some theme blocks similar to the idea behind the character quilt (see sidebar).


The recipient picked all the fabrics and we numbered them so that I knew how many blocks she wanted off each print/colour and how she wanted the theme fabrics to be matched with strip colours.


I ran out of muslin at the retreat (I forgot to bring my stock, doh!), so I started as many blocks as I could so I wouldn't have to refer back to my instructions over and over again.
That did save me time when I got back home on Sunday and I now have all but 8 out of 56 blocks finished, hurray!


I also worked just a tiny bit on my apple baby quilt by appliqueing a little leaf to the apple stem. Well, little steps, little steps! I think I hadn't actually shown a proper picture of this quilt before, so here it is, including the applique worm:


Next, something very exciting! I learned how to paper piece (foundation piece) and do curved seams. I agreed to do a second raffle-quilt block,one of the difficult ones. I practiced the foundation piecing with my scraps and then just jumped in. I was so pleased that it worked out!

Here's the practice piece - I was so excited about the actual block I forgot to take a photo. My curves got better on the raffle quilt block, they didn't have the bumps that this practice piece has :)

And lastly, thanks to all the fabric-activities we had, I now have a pile of Christmas fabric where before I had none, and I also won this beautiful batik fat quarter:

I Jumped Right In!

Last week I went to the monthly quilt guild meeting for the second time and this time I joined. They had a really neat new thing: visitors got a white-star felt name tag and new members got a tag in a heart shape. Old members were asked to make everyone with a star or heart especially welcome and it totally worked. People could easily see that I was new and they had my name so starting a conversation was easy!

Best of all, the programs coordinator mentioned to me that the guild executive goes on a weekend retreat every fall, and there were three spaces still open and wouldn't I want to go along? Yay! Great for me as newbie to see a) what it's like to quilt alongside other quilters on my own projects and b) get to know some of the other members of the guild, c) learn lots of tips from all the experienced quilters that will be there, and d) to get to see a beautiful B&B in PEI for a really good price (2 nights plus meals for 100$, holy cow!!!) .

I ended up taking advantage of the guild's quilting library and borrowed one of the Elm Creek Quilts books that I hadn't read yet (probably because my town library doesn't have it - I wonder how many more are out there... chould look it up online I suppose).

At next month's meeting, members are encouraged to bring a little crafty something in a paper bag, anonymous, and we'll have a sort of secret santa for christmas. I look forward to making a little something of my "non-quilty how to" side bar :)

I also committed to making a block for the raffle quilt for next year's quilt show. I would have done more than one block, but the 6 blocks that make up the stunning quilt are mostly paper-pieced and I don't know how to do that. I had a hard enough time with all the tiny pieces in this block, phew. Not even that tiny, but it's a different story when my seam allowances are mixed with that of other quilters. At least when I make the whole quilt, I know it'll work out because all the block will be a bit smaller than intended :)

I received a ziploc bag that contained the instructions and precut pieces of fabric:

Once I figured out which fabric is which, I started on the small half-square triangles.

They were supposed to be 2" squares in the end, and I managed to trim them all to about that size. I couldn't imagine making a whole quilt in this pattern, so much cropping just for one block!!! I guess I am not a very patient person ;)


In the end, the layout worked out pretty well:


The guild meeting was on Wednesday and this block was finished by Saturday - I guess I was very excited :)


Because all this wasn't enough, I also signed up for the Mystery Quilt. I've heard about them, but had never done one before.

Again, we got instructions (they're on step 3, but I didn't miss much because step 1 was picking fabric and step 2 was cutting).


We had to pick a bold medium print, a dark and a light fabric. I tried to match a light and dark to a batik out of my stash first, but gosh, it's hard to match anything other than batik or solid, prints just didn't work with the batik, at least within the realm of my stash. Here are my choices:


I cut enough fabric for the smaller of the two size choices - what they call a wall hanging (38"x38"). It was that or a queen size quilt, and not knowing what it'll look like in the end, I didn't want to take the risk. Plus, the bigger quilt just uses blocks twice as big - and 9" half-square triangle blocks are not really my thing I'd say.


Then I went on to step three and matched up all the slightly larger squares destined to become half-square triangles and sewed them together. Also a lot of sewing!


Now, I don't really like cutting the little corners off after I iron the blocks, so I did it before I cut the squares in half, by snipping a wedge out of each corner between the seams, just a tad pointier than a 90 degree angle.

(I already cut and ironed all my blocks, so I just held two together, you get the idea :)

Not sure if it saved any time, I guess I didn't have to pick up as many pieces, as I cut the eqivalent of 2 HST blocks with every piece I snipped.

I'm very excited to see where this is going. Right now I'm expecting a star, probably because I just made one for the raffle quilt :)

So, I'd call that a case of me jumping in with both feet! Oh, and I'm the youngest member by three years. The next one up turned around in her seat, grinned and said "Yes! I'm not the youngest any more!!!" She was busy during the meeting making a Grandmother's Flower Garden out of less-than-penny-sized hexagons. I mentioned that the pattern is aptly named, because she'll likely be a granny by the time it's done. The patience some people have!!!

I'm so excited about the next meeting!

And tomorrow I'll show you how the story of my Imagination 1/Soft quilt continues :)