Guild meeting and charity quilts

The Empire Quilt Guild met on Saturday. Te speaker whose name I have, alas! lost was a rep of the Sulky Thread Company. She showed a great many beautiful vests and jackets as well as many quilts, mostly wall size, that were quilted with the great variety of threads Sulky makes, including many metallics. Most of the pieces were very handsome -- almost enough to make me think I really should indulge in a proper, modern new sewing machine that could handle these rather precious threads as my ancient machine cannot. The above is just one example. I took the picture, not because of the quilting but because this is a unusual example of color-wash technique - it's much more dramatic and effective than the ones that are generally, to my taste, too pretty and precious.

I showed my selvage/reversible quilt in show and tell and I'm glad Karen Griska was there to see it for real. It'll be on the quilt website with a lot of beautiful show & tell wonders [and I do mean wonders].
Because I was a part of S&T a woman came to me after the meeting and told me that she volunteers at a children's organization in the Bronx. She said she had wondered who I was because three of my charity quilts have been hung as wall decoration at the place she volunteers. Of course I didn't know this, I supposed all the quilts I've given the charity committee have been given to children. So that was very interesting to know. This quilt is another charity quilt I've made and just finished Sunday and will contribute next month. At each quild meeting two or three tables in a separate area are covered with sheets with multiple lumpy piles beneath them. These are the scraps or unwanted donations of fabrics - notions like buttons and such, even tote bags] that members bring in to share with others. These are not available for examination until the meeting is finished. The quantity and quality of course varies greatly from month to month.

At the end of the meeting those of us -- and I'm certainly among them -- curious for bargains, surge toward the tables like pigs to a trough when the farmer appears with his bucket of slops. It is truly a feeding frenzy scene. We each see what we can find that will fit our needs. The chairwomen of the "share tables" then arbitrarily set a price for donation, it's usually only $2 or $3 for a handful of fabrics.

I go into all this because this baby quilt is a product of the September share table. The Mother Goose motif fabric is a decorator fabric of which I found a couple of scraps adding up to at least a yard. The bright green pin dotted fabric was also from the table. The other fabric is a larger piece I which was sufficient for the backing as well as the stripping. Found, turned into something useful and redonatd. Very satisfying.