QuiltCon 2017 Charity Quilt Challenge Begins!

As we ramp up our 2017 Quiltcon Charity Quilt Challenge project I wanted to send out a little information about the project. Every year this is a BIG project and our guild always rises to the occasion to create an amazing quilt. This year my goal is to involve more members than ever in the process! At our last meeting we revealed the project. This quilt at Heritage Park by Vanecea Greene inspired our charity quilt for 2017. The design concept

Vanecea Greene's Orange Peel Quilt inspired
this year's charity quilt.

this year is “scale” so we decided to adapt this concept into a flying geese quilt. We will be using two yellow shades and the two blue shades to wrangle this palette a little more!

Here is our timeline for the project

July 9	Making kits for distribution at the July/August meetings
July/August Meetings	Kit Distribution – Read below for details
August 20 Sew Day	Making blocks
September Meeting	Kits due back
September 17th Sew Day	Top assembly/planning
October 22nd Sew Day	Top assembly/planning/ backing/binding/sleeve
November 19th Sew Day	Final sew day – hopefully the quilt is done at this point
Early November	Off to the quilter!
December	Binding and Sleeve attached
January	Shipping

Right now it feels like we have all the time in the world but that is definitely not true! It all happens so quickly and there is a lot of work to do!

There will be 32 kits to make blocks for the quilt. You can get them at the July/August meetings and in August if I am around I can do some delivering. We are going to ask that you give us a $5 deposit to take a kit. When you return the blocks completed you will get your $5 back – we promise! This year we opted to purchase fabric for the quilt rather than asking members to share their stash with us. We did this for a couple of reasons, the first being that it’s faster to get fabric at a store rather than waiting until the next meeting to gather stash and hope we had enough. This allows us to get the project moving a whole month faster than we could have if we waited a month to gather fabric from all of you. We also thought that the design needed a certain level of cohesiveness as well as variety – we hope we achieved that when we went shopping! We can’t afford to lose any fabric and we are hoping that the deposit prevents this.

Each kit makes this set of blocks (well you will make just one more block than this) and it takes about an hour and a half to assemble all of these. It’s pretty quick sewing because most of it can be chain pieced. In the kit you will get instruction so hopefully the process is fun and painless for everyone! I am hoping to do a little sew day tutorial at one of our August sew days.

Perhaps making a kit is not your style. That’s OK! There are lots of jobs to do! At our September 17th and October 22nd sew days you can come and help assemble the quilt top. It’s going to be a HUGE undertaking to get all of these little blocks in their places, many hands will make light work on those days. Bring your machine, or set up a pressing station, or get your math hat on – we will take all the help we can get!

If you are a longarmer – we are currently looking for someone to do that job! For the past two years Mary Dylke of No Rules Quilting has graciously done this job and she is willing to do it again but just in case someone else feels passionate about contributing their skills in this area I am throwing it out to all of you! The quilt should be ready by early November which would give you about 3-4 weeks to complete the quilting. You can contact me on facebook or catch me at a meeting to let me know that you are interested in doing the quilting.

But maybe your favourite part is the binding?! And the sleeve?! Well we have the perfect job for you. With luck, the quilt will be quilted by the end of November or early December and ready for binding and attaching the sleeve/label. If you know that you will have time to do this work in December please let me know!

Phew! If you are still reading I am impressed! The end goal is to ship the quilt in the second week of January so that we know it will arrive on time for the February 3, 2017.

You can download a copy of the instructions to the blocks here.