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Saturday, September 14, 2013

Visiting a New Guild

Today I went to my first meeting of the St. Louis Modern Quilt Guild. I had high hopes and the guild lived up to them! The group was much smaller than my last guild; I would estimate about 40 people in attendance. It was nice because it felt more intimate than my last guild. It was obvious that everyone knew each other's name and they were all on very friendly terms.

I do not consider myself a modern quilter. I do not like to use exclusively solids and I don't like asymmetrical designs or anything super abstract. But the real reason I was interested in this guild was to make friends my own age. I was not disappointed; I estimate that many if not the majority of the men and women in the room were in their thirties. Very, very different from my guild in California where nearly everyone was retired (hence the daytime meetings).

One thing I didn't think about when joining this guild was how inspired I would be. These modern quilts emphasize a lot of color and design concepts that I have never considered, and I think even if I don't take up modern quilting I will learn a lot from these ladies. The members of the group were also incredibly accomplished; we had multiple quilt book authors in the room! Cool!

All in all I had a great time, and I even if I don't quilt "modern" myself, I think I will get along with this group just fine. At today's meeting they were revealing the results of a recent challenge. The challenge was to make a quilt that incorporated the Ohio Star block. The variety of interpretations was really astounding.

I only got photos of half the entries, but hopefully you can get an idea for the cool stuff that was displayed.  These modern quilts exhibit a lot of use of whites and greys, colors I shy away from.  I think being in this guild will really expand my horizons!


This one was the winner. It looks so cool!

After the guild meeting I had another big accomplishment: I bought fabrics for my veggie quilt!


These are just the purchased ones; I have a lot of scraps I will use as well. I spent probably an hour or more in the store puzzling over the color combinations. An intrepid saleswoman made a huge difference in helping me make the right fabric choices.  I am really excited about how these colors look together, in no small part because they are not the colors I would have chosen for my own quilt, which made the selection process far more difficult.


I used my boyfriend's fancy pants camera for these photos; I have been taking pointers from the first iteration of Beth's quilt photography link-up.


Below they are sorted by color group. It was a long, tough road to getting these colors picked but now that I have them and the hardest part is over (to me), I feel nothing but excitement! I am ready to get this show on the road!


Once I got these home I tried to stitch all the edges to get them ready to be pre-washed...omg most boring task ever. I actually stopped halfway through and looked up pinking rotary blades online. Unfortunately they don't appear to make them in 60mm, which is the rotary cutter size I have. So I actually did suck it up and manually sew all the edges. This reminds me of why I never pre-wash! Blah!

Okay more updates soon since I bet the majority of my Sunday will be spent on stitching.




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