What's under your needle this month?

Each week, I post something at the Quilters' Quarters Facebook page ( you can always find the link at the top of this blog's homepage, but for those reading in an email, I'll post it for you here:
https://www.facebook.com/QuiltersQuartersGeorgetownMA/

This month, I've continued to work on comfort quilts for our police cruisers, ambulances and fire trucks, and also on blocks that will be used by the Georgetown Quilters group making lap quilts for Georgetown's large number of military veterans. The group has presented more than twenty in the past few years. Quilters' Quarters provides fabric at cost to the group of quilters, and when possible donates full bolts of red, white or blue fabrics. We get together once a month to share ideas and work on quilts. This past week I made some LeMoyne Stars using a strip pattern with specialty ruler by Deb Tucker's Studio 180.

Deb Tucker's Studio 180 Rapid Fire LeMoyne Stars
12.5  inch blocks

This retails for 32.50 at quilt stores, but at Quilters' Quarters, you can borrow before purchasing!

I've been quilting for more than forty-five years now, and have acquired my favorite notions and fabrics one by one, spreading the cost of each over a number of quilts made for family and friends ... for new quilters, the cost of templates like this one, added to the cost of retail fabrics and threads and daily notions like needles, pins, seam rippers (I call those 'froggers,' because I "rip it, rip it, rip it") can discouraging buying and trying these quilting tools.

I teach quilting to youngsters and seniors alike, and want to help them begin building a collection of tools, fabric and threads.  I can discount the fabrics and threads, but many manufacturers of templates require that the MSRP (manufacturer's suggested retail price) be honored wherever their items are sold. Rather than discourage quilters with these prices, with so many templates to choose from, I want to encourage them to try them out, and am beginning to stockpile a lending library of such tools in the Quilters' Quarters shop.

I also encourage new quilters to stop in for a free lesson on a quilt block now and then ... this past week, I've been sharing instructions for the "Ten Minute Block" designed by Suzanne McNeil, who has written several pattern books using this and other blocks. The Ten Minute Block has only three seams and looks much more complicated than it actually is. Suzanne tells in her you tube videos how to roll back a seam to form a cathedral window curved look, using all straight seams. I've played a bit, using five inch charm squares for veterans' quilt blocks, and ten inch squares made of 2.5" jelly roll strips for a Christmas quilt:

The center block appears after the third seam is sewn;
here, it looks like a cube or square.

    

Here, with a rolled edge topstitch, it appears to
have been formed by curved seams. 

These 2.5" strips are from Hoffman's
 'Jingle Pop' collection, in stock 
at Quilters' Quarters. The solid center block
is from a bolt of coordinating fabric.

An optical illusion occurs when the blocks are joined together ..,. stop in to the shop to see what happens to those center blocks!

As always, thanks for reading my shop's blog. Please feel free to forward this email (if you're reading this in email) or share the URL of the page with your friends and family. And if the posted schedule  doesn't work for you, give me a call and we can set up a time more convenient to your own schedule.

~ Terry Crawford Palardy