National Quilting Day

Hooray! There's a whole day set aside for Quilting - how great is that? This year I have to be at work facilitating one of our multi-day workshops, so I won't have time to sew on my own projects until tonight. Never fear though - this workshop is taught by Sue Nickels so I'm soaking in all the quilty vibes until I get home.

What am I currently working on you ask?

Well, I recently finished my #maythe4thmqs2 Star Wars swap mini quilt. This won't ship until end of April, but I had a grand time putting this together. I scrappy/improv pieced the emblem, then fused it to the background before zig-zag stitching around it & adding quilting.

With Junior Quilters at work (a monthly quilt group for kids ages 10-17) we've been working on a series of Footie quilts. These are named for & inspired by the Footie Collection by Dorris McManis, who challenged herself to make a 12"x12" or Foot x foot quilt every week for a year (she ended up with 78!). I pulled from the variety of techniques and inspirations to direct the Junior Quilters to make 4 footies of their very own!

My samples are shown above and showcase the 4 prompts:
Top Left- Improv strips & hand quilting, in the style of Gee's Bend quilts
Top Right- Embellishment, using a season/holiday/time of year as the focus
Bottom Left- Layers
Bottom Right- Journal Quilt

The students have done a fantastic job interpreting the prompts and stretching their skills & creativity.    


I'm also this -> <- close to finishing the quilting on my Disco quilt. Finally!  It's giant sized, but soon enough I'll be able to trim the sides and figure out binding. Hopefully tonight will see the final quilting stitches in this one - especially since it's on my 2017 Finish Along Q1 list!


How are you enjoying National Quilting Day?