May Meeting Recap

Not all forty seven of us are in this photo, but this group shot will be sent to 
Make Modern Magazine where we will soon be a featured guild. 
Make Modern is an online magazine published in Australia.

Our May meeting was busy and fun with preparations underway for summer meetings and workshops, mini-quilts ready to mail, Habitat homes almost ready for quilts and even a magazine feature in the works.

Congratulations in Order

Flaun Cline of Spool

Kudos to Flaun Cline (and Maddie Kertay) for their lovely brick-and-mortar fabric store, Spool--home of 12,000 Facebook BadAss quilting fans and followers--being named as one of the ten best quilt shops / fabulous stores in America (if not the world)! You can read all about it in the latest issue of Quilt Sampler magazine. Go by the store and see for yourself!

Patricia Steadman
(Not the Flower Pots quilt!)

We also congratulate Patricia Steadman, whose Flower Pots quilt was chosen for AQS in Paducah, Kentucky. Fabric designer Kate Spain was pleased to see that Patricia had used some of her own collections in the flowers and invited Patricia to write a guest blog post. That's linked in our Facebook page, or you can go read Patricia's post here. You can see a photo of the real Flower Pots quilt on Kate Spain's blog, The Drawing Board.

Habitat for Humanity Quilts

To see all of us with our blocks, check out our Instagram account @ChattMQG 
and watch the silent video. This is a representative sample of the 22 that were turned in.

On Saturday, June 18, three more Habitat homes will be opened for their families. Our members took home scraps from our April program, sewed them into log-cabin-like blocks, and brought them back. They are now in the assembly line to become one of the next three quilts.

The twelve most classic cabins are now sewn together for a throw (60" x 72"). The remaining blocks will be used for another one. This top is ready to be passed along to our volunteer quilter.

Mark your calendars for June 18 because we need to be at three homes at the same time for the quilt giftings!

Photo Directory Update

We have grown since Veronica prepared our directory in February. If you are a new member and have not yet been photographed, please email us a clear head shot and your directory info and we will try to get it in our next update. Use the address in our sidebar and we will forward to Veronica.

Thoroughly Modern Minis

Several of us signed up to participate in a Tennessee swap for modern mini quilts. Six of us brought our minis to guild and we photographed them together before sending them to recipients in the other Tennessee guilds: Memphis Area, Music City, and Knoxville.

Remember to bring the mini you received to our June 11 meeting so everybody can see.

Maison & Objet

We were delighted and inspired by Ann Hurley's program for May. Ann shared an amazing presentation that she created for her business with photos of the latest trends in color and design from a huge trade show in Paris. What a treat to see artistic creations and color combinations straight from the design runway! Thank you so much, Ann, for bringing some Paris our way. 

Show and Tell

Top to bottom, left to right

1. Flaun Cline front; Flaun Cline back; Flaun Cline; Patricia Steadman
2. Gerry Haywood, Kate Trundle, Vanessa King, Toni Faidley (front)
3. Tony Faidley (back), Theresa Kitchell, Theresa Kitchell, Shirley Prince
4. A row of Mary Keasler's work after she attended the Spool-sponsored Melissa Averinos Faces workshop

April Meeting Recap

Program: Blocks for a Habitat for Humanity Quilt

Last month the local paper published an article about our guild highlighting our work making quilts for each new Habitat house built in Chattanooga and dedicated in 2016. Someone read the article and contacted our guild about donating a box of fabric. One box ended up being three, and we accepted the donation with thanks. The fabric was of different kinds, weights, conditions, and freedoms, meaning quite a bit of it was still in the form of clothing. We washed, dried, ironed and sorted as much as we could before the April meeting, put the prepared fabric into paper shopping bags, and brought it in to share.

Members came to the meeting with big squares of batting to use as design surfaces, some pieces from their own stashes, scissors and pins. Everyone randomly (well, some of us had trouble with that concept) drew strips, squares and hunks (of fabric) out of the bags and arranged them into improvisational blocks. Our target size was 12" to 15" untrimmed.

One of the best parts was being able to work together without having to haul in a lot of equipment. 

We decided to place a bit of red in every block we made to give the quilt some cohesiveness. We rolled up our designed blocks in the batting to take home and sew. We will ask members to bring back their blocks in May so we can use them to form a top for a quilt that will be given to some happy new Habitat homeowners in June.

Show and Tell