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Bosbee Quilting

Bosbee Quilting
BosBee Quilting

Saturday, September 26, 2015

Quilting Bee and Classes

I have been kicking around the idea of a quilting club/bee and quilting classes in my home town area for a while now.  This past Monday evening I attended a wonderful quilting guild in a nearby town and learned a lot from some great and talented quilters.  They were amazing and I just was in awe of the quilts and quilted projects they presented at show and tell.  They were so welcoming and warm I would love to join their guild but I vowed when I retired after 30 years of driving in bad weather that I would not do any driving in the winter, or at least not to go very far.  So I am still determined to create a group in our area. So ladies and gents, we are going to do this.  If you are interested in joining a group for quilting, please let me know privately and we will set up our first meeting.  If you do not have my personal information, just leave a comment here with your e-mail and I will contact you.  This group is open to ALL, no matter what your skill level.  If you are a beginner, GREAT! We will learn together.  If you are an advanced quilter, GREATER YET!  You can help teach your way of doing things and maybe give tips and pointers to the rest of us.

I will be offering classes for anyone who would like a little one on one instruction.  I will only have 3 to a class so that I can give individual attention.  Or if you prefer, we can do private lessons.  I want this to be fun, not work.  Also, if you have a sewing machine that you just don't know how to operate, bring it to me along with all instruction books, accessories (such as the feet that came with it) and I will work with it to see what all it can do.  I will need to have the machine at least two weeks before our first class to become familiar with it.  And please understand, I DO NOT fix sewing machines.  It will have to be a working machine in order for me to see what it can do.  The type of quilting I teach can be done on any home sewing machine.  You do not need a fancy machine that is touted as a quilter's machine. You just need a well running machine with a good straight stitch.  So let's do this!

I have actually been doing some quilting.  I have a habit of buying boxes of material at auctions and invariably there will be some quilt blocks that someone has painstakingly sewn together but never finished.  I have so many of these and some are very pretty and well put together.  Others are pretty, but the construction leaves something to be desired.  I started thinking about the quilt blocks that were left to me by my grandmother and great grandmother.  I just love them and would love to do something with them, but there are not very many, so making a quilt would be difficult if not impossible.  So I got out some of the purchased blocks to play around with and boy did I have fun and come up with some ideas.

These blocks were put together mostly by hand.  They were a bit out of square and the points were not exactly perfect.  But I thought they were kind of pretty.  My hubby thought they looked like the old sign off screen on the TV in the 50's and 60's (only those of you my age will understand that!).  But I researched them and found they are called Millwheel Block.  So I set out to do something with them.




The first thing I thought was that they could be made into a small quilt.  The maker of these had set together four of the blocks so I will make a wall hanging or small doll quilt from those.  But I wanted to do something with just one block.  So I settled on a throw pillow.  I had an old pillow that was falling apart.  What you can't see it that it is stained, has tears and holes so I decided to re-cover it.

I quilted and embellished one of the Millwheel blocks and this is what I created.  I used a decorative stitch along the border and I reached into the box of buttons I got from my grandmother and found this neat red one that worked beautifully.  It hides the not-quite-perfect points in the middle of the block.  My quilt in the ditch method will help to hold the block together and in the very corner I had to add a small piece of red fabric to get the block square but by adding the borders and quilting you would have to know where it is in order to see it.  So this got me to thinking.  How many of you have quilt blocks from a loved one who has passed on and you want to do something with them?  There are a lot of ways to use them for pillows, tablerunners, wall hangings, etc.  



This pillow goes just right with the red work quilt that we found among my husband's grandmother's quilts.  We don't know if she made it, but it is from the 40's or 50's and we love it.

Well that is all for now, and remember...

Keep on Quiltin'!

Norma




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