April Sew, Pinterest, and the Next Meeting

This past Saturday, the ECMQG met up in Pensacola for not only a sewing day, but also a shopping trip!  We met at A & E Pharmacy first thing in the morning, to do some serious shopping at a group discount!  A & E has such a great selection of fabrics - I think everyone found what they needed, and then some. 

After shopping, we headed over to Martelli's for the sewing part of our day.  If you're not familiar with Martelli's, they have so many great and innovative quilting products, and they're located right in Pensacola!  As usual, it was a great time sewing together as a group - we sewed, talked, ate, helped each other with basting quilts, and gave each other input on projects.

Our next meeting is coming up on Friday, April 27 at 10 am at Lynn's Sewing Center in Fort Walton Beach.  At the meeting, we'll be starting a discussion on making a charity quilt.  We'll be discussing everything from possible charities, color schemes, quilt patterns, and time frames. 

To help get the discussion started, the ECMQG now has a Pinterest account, with a board dedicated to this future charity quilt.  Looking forward to getting this started!

March Meeting

It was another great meeting of the ECMQG!  We had 15 people and 3 new members, bringing our total members to 19.  Amazing!

The Kona Solids Challenge reveal happened during this meeting, but that's blogged about in a separate post, found here.

We discussed our next sew on Saturday, April 14 at Martelli's in Pensacola from 10-3. However, at 9 am we'll be meeting at A&E in Pensacola to do some fabric shopping!  If you've never been to A&E before, now's the time. 

Kelly S. talked about spray basting.  Spray basting is a quick, easy, and effective way to baste your quilts without using pins.  It seems like everyone who spray bastes has their own special way of doing it.  Kelly discussed three different methods.

The first was Ashley's, from Film In the Fridge, who spray bastes on a floor.  She writes about her method here.

Second was Patsy Thompson's method.  She chooses to baste on a wall.  You can see her method towards the end of this video.

And then there was Cindy Bettinger's unique method of using a table and a metal rod to roll out the quilt top and back.  She writes about that here.

Not everyone in our guild chooses to spray baste, but even those of us who primarily do walked away with some new ideas and techniques to try out.

We also talked about the QuiltCon Block Challenge.  It's a fun way to get involved with QuiltCon from the comfort of your own home!  Basically, the challenge is to create a block reflecting what modern quilting means to you, using the colors of the QuiltCon logo.  Blocks can be submitted up until August 15.  Elizabeth Hartman of Oh, Fransson, will choose 20 or more of her favorite blocks to be made into a quilt that will be raffled off at QuiltCon.  The other blocks will also be made into quilts that will be donated to the Austin Children's Shelter.  It's a very cool challenge, and as a guild we'll submit our blocks together, the deadline being our July meeting.

Thankfully, the store we have our meetings at agreed to have FQ bundles made up in the colors of the QuiltCon logo.  Kelly S. chose the fabrics, and the wonderful staff at Lynn's cut the bundles for us during our meeting!  To find out more about the color inspiration for this fabric bundle, you can read Elizabeth's post here.

As usual, we had a Show and Tell at the end of our meeting.  Here's just a few pictures from that...

Great meeting.  Lots of talent was showcased.  Looking forward to what's to come.