July UFO Night

“The Remnants”  meet monthly for a Friday UFO night.  It seems that I’m a Remnant too – as is anyone from Town and Country Quilt Club who joins in with the friendly bunch of stitchers.   It’s usually Murphy’s Law that we are more often than not away in the caravan somewhere or other for the weekend so I have to miss.   But I’m feeling lucky as this is the second month in a row I’ve been able to attend.   I took hand stitching, plus my contribution to the shared meal.  And as usual with these “pot luck” meals, we had a good variety to share.  Delicious home made pumpkin soup and bread rolls to start, then sausage rolls, pizza and quiche.  Followed by home made chocolate slice, chocolate fish and pineapple lumps, (a Kiwi favourite) and tea and coffee.  Appetites sated, we all got down to our stitching.

There were only a couple of sewing machines working away last night, and one of them belonged to Kathy F who was looking for inspiration on how to machine quilt her daughter’s owl quilt.  All the owls had different expressions as they looked out across the hall at all those noisy ladies.  Kathy concentrated in machine quilting around each block to hold them in place, and around each owl.  She still wasn’t quite sure of how to tackle the alternate blocks, but was given plenty of suggestions to think about.  The other Kathy attending was busily using the club light box to trace out the appliqué pieces for her “Bordeaux Berries Table Runner”.

Kathy’s owl quilt

Leigh was doing something completely different.  She was assembling needle cases to put in the goodie bags for the upcoming Quilt Symposium Manawatu as a gift to promote her new venture “Threaded Needle Retreat”.  Who wouldn’t want to go away for a weekend sewing?  Sandra kindly offered to help Leigh and together they assembled all that Leigh had brought with her.  Still a lot more to go, it seems.

Sandra and Leigh working on the needle cases

Sara was working on the 9th and last block for her Chateau Hexagon wall-hanging.  This lovely design by Lynette Anderson features embroidery, piecing, and the tiniest little hexagons.

  Sara’s lovely stitching

Vickie was working on the third appliquéd border for her sumptious Civil War Bride quilt.  She showed me a photo of the quilt on her Smart Phone (these phones have too much technology for me to cope with)  and it is looking stunning.  After doing all this hand work, Vickie has decided that the quilt really deserves to be hand quilted too.

Appliqué pieces traced for Vickie’s third border

The other sewing machine was used by Vickie’s daughter, 12 year old Hannah.  Hannah is a member of our quilt club too, and was busily working on making colourful nine patch blocks  for her Susan Claire designed kitset quilt, Fish.  She loved her new woolly hat and it never left her head all evening.

Hannah making nine patch blocks

Janelle’s “Afternoon Delight”  quilt is coming along well.  These appliqué blocks are prepared using glue stick with freezer paper – gets all those points nice and sharp.  (Not at all like my quick and easy preferred method of whipping around the edges with machine appliqué).  There are an awful lot of blocks in this quilt, just right for someone like Janelle who loves hand appliqué.

Janelle’s latest blocks prepared and ready to appliqué

And as for me, I’m just about finished on making all the yo-yos for my Christmas Reindeer, only a few left to do now.  Guess the next step will be for me to get the pattern out, and read how to make his little reindeer face and legs.  I’m not even going to worry about how to put all those yo-yos together just yet, hopefully someone will give me some good advice if I find it all a bit confusing.

Thanks ladies, for another convivial stitching night.  I particularly enjoyed our discussion on the merits of Colin Firth as the best Mr Darcy to ever grace our screens, (swoon), and as for our further discussion on  Lee Child’s book character Jack Reacher, (another swoon or two), you can see it doesn’t take much to make me happy!