Our entry for the QuiltCon 2015 Charity Quilt Challenge arrived on time in Austin, Texas.
Here is a photo of the quilt back:
The quilt design of foundation paper pieced flying geese and appliquéd dresdens comes from our creative muse, Candi Lennox.
Once the challenge rules were published by The MQG, Candi started her design process and enlisted Yvonne Wecker in early September to help her test the fpp templates. They then went to work cutting the fabric to give each guild member one of these lovely fabric bundles.
We held a sew-in on September 20th where Candi and Yvonne provided a quick tutorial on foundation paper piecing. We gained a new fpp convert in Jen Petzold, known as our very own Queen of Improv. Did you see that quilt back? We’ll wait while you scroll back up and take another look. Jen created three phenomenal improv sections and handed them off to Yvonne who put them together with her embroidered JAXMQG label to form the back.
Jen wasn’t our only new fpp convert. April Kier joined our guild during the sew-in and was thrilled with her first attempts at paper piecing.
As you can see, the templates had four large geese or eight small curved geese. We had the curved templates pointing both left and right. Guild members were asked to make one large and one curved section from their fabric bundle and many thanks also go to Robin McCallister, Angela Williams, Symone Williams, Janette Hughes, Valerie Lanham and Jessie Silverman for their contributions.
The blocks were due at our October meeting and Candi, Robin and Jen settled on the basic layout of the quilt top. Jen gathered up left over fabric and used her magic on the back. Our quilt was also the traveling quilt going from one person to another, off to Alabama with Candi over the Thanksgiving holiday and then with Yvonne to Orlando during the first week of December.
Candi pieced the top, and then made the dresdens which were pinned with the curved geese for Yvonne to appliqué using invisible thread.
The final layout was tweaked numerous times to add those last few elements to enhance the alternate grid work.
Yvonne decided to tszuj up the dresden centers by adding a bit of embroidery. The pattern was created by Robin for another project, but we all agreed the design would work in our quilt.
Yvonne completed the quilt top, back and sandwiching to hand the quilt back to Candi just before Christmas for her 80+ hours of free motion quilting. Don’t you just love the pebbling and free motion waves all done on a home machine? Did you catch the ghost dresdens and geese that Candi quilted into the background?
While Candi pulled a few all nighters quilting, Yvonne created 528 inches of scrappy piping
playing with the piping hot binding tool in advance for her workshop at QuiltCon.
We used Kona Capri, our background solid fabric for our binding to make our piping pop.
Additional thanks to Candi for shipping our labor of love off to Austin via FedEx on New Year’s Eve.
We love our QuiltCon 2015 Charity Quilt and hope you enjoyed reading about our process. If you’re at QuiltCon, we would be honored if you took a look at
Silly Goose – Catch Me if You Can by the Jacksonville Modern Quilt Guild.