Quilty Pleasures-Chicken River Modern Quilt Guild

We are excited to announce the Chicken River Modern Quilt Guild in Las Vegas, New Mexico. The Gallinas River flows through this, the original Las Vegas, and gallinas means chickens, so that's where the name came from.

We even have a blog with our introductory story: http://chickenrivermodernquiltguild.blogspot.com/

We hope if you live in the area you can come play with us!

Here are a few things we have been working on:

This is a challenge where we each had three fat quarters and could add two other fabrics to make a modern style block. Our goal is to use up all the fat quarters and they seem like they go on and on. After that, we will make a quilt. That's all we know about that so far.

We have been messing around with hexagons and below is the beginning of a project Ann is working on. Go hexagons!

 I started playing with a charm pack of Zen Chic fabrics:

And Linda brought her finished Las Cruces quilt. It's not totally modern, but it's a stunner nonetheless. More about this quilt later.

And don't forget there's a giveaway of Locally Grown fat quarters. Cute! Deadline is tonight.

Quilty Pleasures: Modern Hexagon Quilt

At QuiltCon Jacquie Gering taught me how to machine piece hexagons, so our Modern Quilt Guild in Las Vegas, NM, asked me to share with them what I learned.

So I shared, in my kind of muddly way, and now we are working on some pieces using giant hexagons. I have been doing my usual procrastination thing and haven't made much headway but Betty brought her finished quilt to the last meeting and it is impressive, more so in person.

Note that the gray background isn't one piece of fabric, but hexagons, too, which adds depth to the quilt. The gray isn't your standard quilting cotton;  Betty thinks it might be auto upholstery fabric. It is tweedy and textured, a fun contrast to the center solids.

This quilt is going on a special trip to a long arm quilter where Betty will quilt it herself, her first time.

Betty is one of my quilting heroes: a fearless experimenter, always up for a challenge, ready for adventure.

If you live near Las Vegas, NM, come to our next MQG meeting. We meet the first Monday of the month at 1 pm at ThreadBear.

Quilty Pleasures Monday: Depression Era Blocks, Paper Pieced

Back during The Great Depression, readers could find patterns for clothing or quilt blocks in their local newspapers. The Kansas City Star was one of those newspapers, and they didn't even charge for their complete patterns. Caroline Cullinan McCormick decided to write a book about some of these blocks from the newspaper and adapted many of the designs for paper piecing.

ThreadBear, my local quilt store, decided to offer a Block of the Month program based on this book. So we have bought the book and just finished our first block.

What I like about ThreadBear's BOM is we may choose whatever fabrics we want. I decided to go with a black pindot background and for this month I chose Denyse Schmidt's fabrics from her Shelburne Falls collection.

This fabric looks so pretty and fresh and this block came together nicely.

How do we get such precise results? For my friends who are not quilters, it's called paper piecing, kind of like painting by the numbers. Here is how it looks on the back. Each number shows the order in which the fabric is placed on the paper pattern. Et, voila! It looks perfectly perfect! Just what this ADHD person needs to keep her head on straight.

No, ThreadBear didn't pay me to write about their BOM. I just like their store.

Now I am on my way to meet up with our Modern Quilt Group. We are going to muddle through my presentation on sewing giant hexies by machine, the class I took from Jacquie Gering at QuiltCon.