Modern BOM Quilt for Charity

If you're a follower of either Sew, Mama, Sew or Alissa's blog, you're probably familiar with Alissa's Modern BOM that she did on SMS every month for a year.  The ECMQG wanted to use those beautiful, modern blocks to make a quilt that would be used to raise money for a local charity.

We decided on the charity, Children in Crisis, which is a local charity, based out of Fort Walton Beach.  They are a foster care facility for children from four counties here in Northwest Florida, and they strive to keep siblings together.  CIC's mission statement is:

“Providing Homes and Establishing Hope” for the abused, neglected and abandoned children of Northwest Florida. The Children’s Neighborhood provides an emergency shelter for young children, and the family foster homes help with the severe shortage of foster homes in our community. Together, we can make a difference in the life of a child.

CIC has a "Children's Neighborhood," which has an emergency shelter, foster homes, a playground, a recreation center, and administration center, and teen transitional housing.

Once we decided on which charity to raise money for, we just need to figure out what kind of quilt to make. Since we are a Modern quilt guild, we decided that Alissa's Modern BOMs would be a perfect way to reflect our aesthetic, and we took it a step further, and selected colors that represent the beautiful Emerald Coast of Northwest Florida.  We used some prints from Lizzy House, Michael Miller, and Valori Wells.  The solids are all Kona solids from a Poseidon FQ Bundle, along with Kona Bone for the background of each block.

The fabrics were cut and divided up into bundles, and at our June meeting, twelve of us signed up for a block to make.

All of the blocks were finished and returned by our August meeting, where we played around with the layout of the blocks.

Melanie, one of our members, volunteered to piece the top together, and we decided to put a sashing between the blocks, to make the quilt a little bit bigger.  She used Kona Putty for the sashing, which ended up being a nice subtle way to make the blocks stand out.

As far as the quilting goes, one of our members (Marcy) has a longarm.  We originally thought a fun way to quilt it would be for everyone who made a block to quilt their block on Marcy's longarm.  So we had our September meeting at Marcy's house, and when it came time to quilt it, we all decided that it would be best if just one person quilted it.  Most of us don't have longarm experience, so we were nervous about messing up!  Marcy was fine quilting it herself, and she does beautiful work, so we were confident in her abilities.

Kathleen, another one of our members, volunteered to put the binding on, which we were all grateful for!

So here's the finished product.  To say that Marcy did a good job on the quilting is an understatement!  It's hard to capture it in pictures, because each block is different, but you can really tell she had fun quilting this, and she really let the blocks speak to her.

Here's some more pictures of this beautiful quilt:

So this is where the fundraising part comes in.  Go to our First Giving page and make a donation.  This fundraiser will be open until the end of November, at that time, one person who made a donation will be selected to receive this quilt!  Our goal is $500, so help us get there!

ECMQG's One Year Anniversary!

The September meeting of the ECMQG was a pretty special one, because we celebrated our One Year Anniversary!  Back at our August meeting, we exchanged scraps with each other for our second Scrap Swap Challenge (you can see the post about the first one here).  So for this meeting, we all brought back what we had made with those scraps, to give to the original owner.  Once again, we had a great time "ooohing" and "aaahing" over what everyone made.

We also had some pretty awesome giveaways, but unfortunately, I didn't get any pictures of people receiving their prizes.  We had a couple of Winterkist charm packs donated by the awesome Monica Solorio-Snow (aka The Happy Zombie), two books donated by C&T Publishing/Stash Books, a Quick Curve Ruler donated by Jenny Pedigo of Sew Kind of Wonderful, and a gift card to the Local Quilt Shop which usually hosts us, Lynn's Sewing Center in Fort Walton Beach.  Amazing, right?

Instead of doing any kind of presentation or demonstration, everyone was asked to bring their first quilting/sewing related item (if they still had it) and/or a tip to share with everyone.  It was fun getting to know everyone better via their sewing beginnings!

We held this meeting at a member's house (Marcy), with the intention of quilting our Modern BOM Charity Quilt on her longarm.  The idea was that everyone who made a block would quilt their own block on the longarm, but in the end, we decided that in order to keep the quilting cohesive, Marcy would just quilt the whole thing.  Here it is all set up and ready to quilt!

We talked about some changes that will be happening with the guild in the upcoming months - not to worry, though!  It's all good!  We're going to be getting a bit more organized, and probably start combining our meetings and sew days, to make it easier for more people to come.  More info on that as it progresses.

It's awesome to still see this guild going strong after a year!

Our next sew is coming up at the end of the week - Saturday, October 13 at First Baptist Church in Crestview from noon until 6.  Come!  Bring whatever you'd like to work on!  And bring a snack!

Our next meeting is Friday, October 26 at Lynn's Sewing Center beginning at 10 am.  This is going to be a bit different than usual, because it will primarily be a work day for us.  Some of us are participating in a local craft fair that's being held the next day, so we'll be tagging our stuff, and getting it ready to sell!  We'll still hold a time of Show and Tell, so please still come and hang out with us!