January Show & Tell
I love these after Christmas winter months because for me
there is lots of time for sewing. Later the garden and outdoor things will take
over, but for now it is sewing heaven. The Covid encouragement to stay home has
only helped it along.
Melanie got into candle wicking and made it into a Christmas
stocking. And she did a quilt with umbrellas for her striped piece.
Debby H bought a new-to-her Husqvarna Mega quilter sewing machine and frame so she has been quilting things to learn and practice. She laments that there are other non-sewing things she has to do that take her away from it – housework, laundry . . .
She and Ella made a table centrepiece for sister, Dot, for
Christmas. The block was called Dorothy’s Log Cabin. Have a look at this and
all the other pieces.
Kathy H has been making things she can use: a sewing machine
cover, some bowl covers, a purse for winter and one for summer, and a weekender
bag. The weekender bag is “The Big Easy” pattern but made 6 inches taller so it
will hold enough for retreat.
Pam is sharing “Thimbleberries The Village”. This is a quilt
she had wanted to make for quite some time and it became her Covid quilt,
pieced with fabrics from her stash since shopping was curtailed last year.
Christa has been busy. She has created a Christmas table
runner for a friend.
And another Christmas table runner with her scraps.
Christa’s younger sister in Germany is the lucky recipient
of her Corona quilt. It has over 300 two inch squares and is hand quilted.
Her current project is a green quilt requested by a nephew.
Looking forward to seeing the finished product!
Toni made quite a few heatable/freezable rice bags for
Christmas gifts and also reusable shopping bags in which to gift the rice bags.
Toni has also used Covid time to create. Here is her story.
A few years back, I attended the NB Provincial Gathering
of the Guilds at which I was the lucky winner of a fun little game we played
and won a roll of random colored, 2.5in., various length strips of fabric
donated by the members of the host guild.
Yay! I was asked to make
something from those strips and to report to the next Gathering of the Guilds.
Well, when I returned home and looked at the strips, I
didn’t feel any great attachment to them.
Each strip had its beauty but the colors were so random….. what was I
going to do with them?? So they sat on
my shelf for several years.
Occasionally, I would look at them but nothing came to me. During that time, I did occasionally take a
part of a strip to use in another project.
Oh well….
Last fall, I decided I would just sew the strips together
in a strip quilt and back it with something cozy and donate it. To me a strip quilt is sort of boring, so I
put my strips together so that each color had some of the characteristics of
the colors on either side of it and I placed them on the diagonal which created
a new set of learning experiences for me.
I decided to space the strips with strips of black to “tie the quilt
together”. To me those two steps began
to “work” and I began to like my project a bit better, but I still didn’t rush
to finish the quilt.
Then after taking a Christmas break from quilting, as I
began to work at it, COVID 19 struck the world followed by the Black Lives
Matter movement and I began to look at my project very differently. The strips began to take on meaning; the
colored strips representing the different nationalities living together in our
world with neighboring countries having many similar characteristics to the
countries on their borders; yet the collection of very different colors making
a unique quilt and the black strips indicative of the Black Lives Matter
movement, the worldwide push to make our world a better place, tying all those
colors into one unit.
As I was attaching the short border diagonal pieces, I
realized I didn’t have enough fabric in the correct colors to continue that
border all the way around the outside.
What to do now??? In my stash of
fabric scraps, I found this black piece with little star designs that reminded
me of the corona virus picture that had been front and center for several weeks
already and that was disrupting life as we knew it – worldwide! So I sewed that representation into the border of the quilt. That strip interrupts all the colors in the
quilt; all the nations in the world, as the Corona Virus leaves no country
untouched.
I was beginning to appreciate how this quilt was coming
together with its little mistakes and make-do challenges; not a “pretty” quilt
but meaningful and cozy none-the-less.
It is my hope that this quilt will bring to the current owner comfort, warmth and the sense that they are loved, respected and honored during this rough time in our lives and for many years thereafter and that when looking back at 2020, they will be able to find the good that came from that year.
