I attended the Jane Stickle quilt retreat the weekend before Thanksgiving. This retreat was a celebration of 20 years of continuous retreats. The very first retreat was held in November 1998. I didn't start attending the retreats until November 2007 and haven't missed since.
We had two show & tells this retreat. On Thursday evening we had a special Dear Jane show & tell. Anything item that was made with Jane blocks or special challenges from the last 20 years were eligible to be shown and there was a lot to show. Also . . . there were 9 new Dear Jane quilt finishes.
Last summer, a large online group of retreat attendees started piecing Jane, completing two blocks a week. They will be piecing awhile but their quilts are in progress. The Dear Jane quilt is still alive and happening in our group.
Rosemary always does such a wonderful job of taking pictures at show & tell. I'm going to link to her blog and let you watch from the smile box she made. Rosemary's smilebox, November 2018 retreat. Have your coffee ready to sip while you watch, there are 400 pictures!
Of course I showed my Dear Jane which I hand quilted and finished in 2016.
What else did I do at the retreat besides party?
I pieced a Boston Commons for me. She'll hang in the closet for awhile until I decide how I want her quilted.
The yellow fabric was left from my Nearly Insane quilt. It is nearly impossible to get a good picture, it always show lighter than it really is. I took a close up of a corner and the yellow does look better, at least I thought it did, maybe it doesn't. Oh well.
I took one picture of the flimsy with the light on and the second one the overhead light is off and the blinds pulled shut. It didn't seem to help at all.
My Boston Commons is an old pattern, designed back in the 80's and this is the only pattern I've ever used for this design. I don't know if this method is used in other Boston Commons patterns or not.
First you piece the center and add the first border.
Then you piece the corner sections then attach them which looks rather weird.
Finally you piece the top, bottom and side sections and attach them. After that it's the outside border and it's a flimsy ready to be quilted.
The pattern suggests you use the same fabric as the inside border for the outside. I don't really like light borders for bed quilts that are going to be used. I love deep dark blue so that is what I used.
My quilt is king sized 98" by 120" and is the first flimsy to be crossed off this list for this winter's quilting season.
I also worked on Starlight Express. The center section is pieced. Currently I'm piecing 9-patch blocks to make a border around the center. Hopefully this will be a completed flimsy next week.
Linking to Sew Fresh Quilts, Needle & Thread Thursday, Finished Or Not Friday, Confessions of a Fabric Addict, TGIFF!, Show Off Saturday
My Churn Dash Quilt is completely finished!! I took it out of the frame Wednesday morning and trimmed off the excess backing and batting that afternoon. Thursday morning I stitched the first part of the binding and in the afternoon the hand sewing started and the finish came on Friday afternoon.
A side view to show the border.
Just some more pictures because I'm so excited it's finished.
A view from the back.
This wide back fabric is called "Folio Quilt Backs" by Color Principle for Henry Glass & Co., Pattern #7882. (Information from the selvage)
My quilt is my version of a churn dash quilt made by my husband's great-grandmother, Fannie Baumgartner Kauffman, Clinton Township, Elkhart County, Indiana, 1867 - 1936. Her quilt also was hand-quilted and is in excellent condition.
I prepped fabric for the churn dash blocks the first part of November 2016 and sewed them at the Jane Stickle retreat later that month. The quilt center was sewn together in December then I worked on the borders in January.
The quilting process started February 29th and was finished July 11th; 4 1/2 months. A wool batting was used and it hand stitched so nicely.
She measures 94" by 104". I won't be washing her.
I appreciate the supportive comments many of you have made about entering my quilt into the ISQ Blue & White exhibit.
I need detailed information about this exhibit. There is more than a year to come to a decision. She'll be entered in some local quilt shows first and I'll see how she does in those.
What am I going to work on now? After I finished attaching the binding with my sewing machine, I pulled this fabric from the box where it had been languishing for almost 2 years and pressed out wrinkles. This is the background fabric for the Pastor's Attic Quilt. The fabric looks darker in this picture but in the photo below, it looks lighter.
He may have been out of sight for several month, but he was never out of mind. I've decided the way I want the appliqued borders and need to get prepping on them.
I know several of the blogs I link to are about scrappy quilts and Churn Dash is definitely not scrappy but IT IS A FINISH and I want the whole world to know!
Linking to - Kathy's Slow Sunday Stitching, Quilting Is More Fun Than Housework, Show & Tell Monday With Bambi, Em's Scrapbag, Love Laugh Quilt, Design Wall Monday, BOM's Away, Quilter's Monday, Fiber Tuesday, Esther's Wednesday WOW!, Sew, Stitch, Snap SHOW, Let's Bee Social, My Quilt Infatuation, Confessions of a Fabric Addict, Finished Or Not Friday, TGIFF!, Crazy Mom Quilts, Show Off Saturday
Welcome to my new blog, Gretchen's Little Corner which is a continuation of my old Wordpress blog, Gretchen's Little Corner. I decided to go with Blogger for the new blog for varying reasons. If Blogger doesn't work out, then maybe I'll go back to Wordpress.
If you are new to my blog you will find I post about quilting, farming, gardening or whatever is going on in my life. Special thanks to my daughter for setting up this blog way last summer!
I spent most of 2015 working on my version of the Jane Stickle, also know as a Dear Jane. I just completed her and I'm proud to show her off. If you would like to read about my Jane journey, click here.
I quilted her on the old stands and sticks frame my father made for me 40 years ago. The stands have been reinforced, glued and reinforced more. They are not very stable anymore.
During the Jane Stickle quilt retreat in November, I bought a Grace quilting frame at the resale table. I'm the 3rd owner of this quilting frame, but it has never been put together. My SIL started putting the quilting frame together for me while he and our daughter were here the middle of December. He really enjoyed this project as it was a nice change for him from his academia world.
When he removed the pieces from the box, it looked like this:
He completed structure work, but son 2 did the finishing work on her. Now she looks like this. There are 4 pipe rollers. On the sides there are bungee cords with clamps attached. I was concerned about the sides being taut enough, but they are! In fact I had them too tight and needed to loosen them. She takes up less room width-wise than the old frame did.
My DIL and Son 2 helped me load up the frame for the first quilting project. I decided I wanted to do a smaller quilt (I'm kind of burnt out on quilting at the moment!) and pulled out the Fussy-Cut Star wall quilt I hand pieced in 2014. I don't have a specific time frame to have this wallhanging completed. She'll be finished when is finished.
DIL2 started the quilting on the outside border. You can't see it at all on the top but the black thread shows nicely on the white muslin back. Since this is a wall hanging, I went with an easy decision for the backing fabric.
The borders have been sewn on the Snowflake Zippy-Strippy quilt. I'm going to baste leftover batting strips together for batting. Once they are sewn together, I'll start machine quilting her.
Thank you for joining me on my new blog.
I'll be linking to Esther's Wednesday WOW, Freshly Pieced, My Quilt Infatuation, A Quilting Reader's Garden, Quilt Story, Crazy Mom Quilts, Slow Stitching Sunday, Podunk Pretties, Quilting is More Fun Than Housework and Love Laugh Quilt.
