Basic quilting skills

Hello,


Monday night was the meeting for Minnesota Contemporary Quilters.  I love those meetings they always make me laugh.  I haven't made it for several months due to weather, health and no meeting in December so it was fun to reconnect.  Our speaker this month was a traditional quilter who was speaking about some basic skills such as binding quilts.  Some of us need to work on these skills just a little.  I know that I am hit or miss with my bindings.  I have trouble with the corners and the edges seem to want to curl.  Not pretty!  That is why I signed up a month ago for a class at a local shop, Bear Patch Quilting, called Binding Perfection.  I am mostly a self taught quilter and my self education is spotty at best.  I knew binding was a skill I wanted to improve.  So it was a little bit of serendipity that this was the topic at our meeting.  My class is this afternoon and I need to take something to bind.  I am trying to finish up examples from classes I have taken (at least the samples I like).  So, I am taking a sample from my Flower Power class taught by Susan Brittingham at Quilt University.  The one I am taking to my binding class is one of our beginning examples for the Flower Power class.  I also need to finish the final project for that class but I'll save that for another day.

I took some show and tell to the meeting the other night.  Everyone seemed to like my blue jean quilt.  I made two of these during a class in the learningfa yahoo group.  I cut out all the blue jean circles while I was watching the election debates last fall.  I'm calling this my green quilt!  I used an entire box of old blue jeans cutting 300 circles for the two quilts, and four yards of flannel that I have had laying around since my children were very young.  It felt good to use up so much of my fabric stash.  I had been saving the jeans to make a quilt 'some day.'  It was fun to make it along with other people all encouraging each other along the way.  The red and yellow quilt is my son's, there is a photo of each side for that quilt.  The green and purple quilt is my daughter's.

 

                                   

I also wanted to post a photo of the header I had on the top of my webpage.  I changed it today because it was hard to read the title with that particular quilt in the background.  This quilt was also made for a class at Quilt University.  It is my own design from the class Points and Curves taught by Myrna Giesbrecht when she was at Quilt U.  She is no longer teaching there you can find a link to her webpage on the sidebar (Creative Conversation).  This quilt is called Pursuit of Happiness.  It was part of an exhibit at the Textile Center in St Paul last fall.  The exhibit was called Freedom:  The Fiber of our Nation and was displayed during the Republican National Convention last fall.  Have a great day everyone! Janet