Welcome to Saturday Quilting Bring & Share. Bring along your project(s), a beverage of your choice and share in some conversations and inspiration from the Worldwide Quilting Community. You are very welcome to add your links and thoughts in the comments box at the end of this post. Thank you!
Dashes, Dots and Crosses is a finish! 
I added the binding on Wednesday/Thursday. I am happy with this little quilt.
As I wrote a couple of days ago, the main lessons learned from this design ‘mock-up’ involve keeping snowball corners accurate and pressing some seams open rather than to one to side at the piecing stage. Another little glitch with this particular version of the quilt has been my choice of fabrics, namely the ditsy blue floral from my stash which I think must be a cotton/poly mix. It didn’t behave badly at the piecing stage but when I came to basting and quilting I noticed the floral fabric ‘crosses’ were ‘bubbling up’. I could have quilted across them but I think this would have created puckers so I opted to add buttons to ‘tie’ the centres of the crosses to the quilt sandwich. I don’t mind the puffy look and the butterfly designs on the buttons sit well on the floral fabric.
Next steps are to re-make the quilt to a slightly larger size, piecing 12″ rather than 9″ blocks, and to write a pattern alongside the cutting and stitching…
My blocks for the Missouri Star Quilt Company Square in a Square quilt are coming along. The Moda Mirabelle fabrics are just gorgeous – soft shades of apple and peach, so summery. At a sewing day on Thursday I completed the blocks I’d started at the April meeting. I have forty 11″ blocks. These should be attached together using 1″ sashing. The completed MSQC quilt has two borders which makes for a pretty huge quilt, too big for me to quilt on my domestic sewing machine (without getting frustrated anyway!). I’ve decided to make two lap size quilts each using a four by five block layout. I think with sashing and borders these will be a reasonable size but still manageable enough for me to enjoy machine quilting them. So my project this weekend is to sort the blocks, cut the sashing strips and begin sewing the tops together.
Here are links to just a few recent conversations and inspiration being shared around the Worldwide Quilting Community:
Staring with that important word ‘community’. Here is the link to the second part of Michelle’s series on the subject. In this post she shares how she and five friends embarked on a ‘travelling quilt’ project, the process involved and also gives helpful tips and ideas for other types of group quilts.
Carole has written a really comprehensive piece about choosing colours and fabrics. She’s included lots of photos to illustrate the very helpful information and tips she shares. Definitely a post to read and Pin for future reference.
A few years ago I purchased several on line patchwork quilting classes from Craftsy. The Craftsy platform was sold and became a subscription site called Bluprint. I chose not to take out the subscription, reasoning that the classes I had downloaded were enough to be getting on with. Craftsy and Bluprint offered the opportunity for class buyers to ask questions directly of the on-line tutors – very useful. BUT, much to the consternation and anger of many of the tutors using the platform, Bluprint have just announced that for the past year these tutors have not been receiving notification of questions sent in or been able to access their class in-boxes! Tutors rightly feel their reputations have been tarnished as class buyers may have concluded their questions were willfully ignored. Abby has written about the current problems with Bluprint: Read the full story and an interesting comments thread here. (NB. In the comments section of this post Laura asks how to download classes from Bluprint? Please do add any advice you have to help Laura do this. Thank you!).
Melony is combining her quilting skills and her work with people to create a ‘Wellbeing’ quilt charting the recovery of participants. It’s a great project.
Here’s a really helpful article by Rona about starch (there’s more than one type, did you know?) and how and when to use it in patchwork quilt making.
Finally, a link to a simply delightful documentary made in 2014 to celebrate the life and work of Judith Kerr who died this week. Our children all enjoyed the stories of Mog the cat written and illustrated by this talented, gracious, kind and insightful author. Judith was Jewish and with her family had to flee Nazi Germany in the 1930’s. If you could do with something heart-warming but not sugary I would definitely recommend watching this documentary
Linking with Myra for Finished or Not Friday. Myra has finished her version of a quilt called ‘Play Date’ using a triangle ruler. The quilt pattern by Shannon of ‘The FlemingsNine’ is on sale from her Etsy shop.
Happy Stitching!
Allison