Making a Group Quilt, Part 4 - Assembling Block Kits & Distributing Them

I probably mentioned before that very few of the people who work on this quilt are quilters other than for this. Part of the original plan when this fell to us was to involve as many people as possible. We wanted more of the church to feel ownership for the quilts, especially since the person who buys a quilt is frequently one of the people who worked on it. Or her mother, in the case of one quilt where we had a couple of young piecers work on it. Also, of course, the more people who work on the quilt, the more quickly it gets finished. (You probably already had that part figured out.

To that end, we recruit anyone with a sewing machine or anyone who is willing to do a little hand piecing. We put together block kits (we use a lot of Zip-Loc bags for this part), complete with instructions that cover every eventuality that I can think of and color pictures of each step made with the fabric we are using. The instructions emphasize the necessity of an accurate 1/4 inch seam, which directions to press the seams, and finished size. In years with more than block, this means several sets of directions, of course. All of this (except the directions so we don't waste church paper making more sets of directions than necessary) goes into a numbered Zip-Loc bag.

Once the kits are assembled, I print up sign out sheets which include the kit number and columns for the name of piecer, her email address, the date the block was taken, and the date it was returned. I use numbered bags the first year, and I'm pretty sure I didn't get them all back. But we learn from our mistakes! And, yes, because I am cheap (or to help the environment) we reuse the bags from year to year.

Then the kits go to church to be distributed. The first four years I stood up in each service (well, at least each English speaking service) and described what was going on. (I like microphones even less than I like cutting!) Last year's top was already done so I got to skip this step. Over the years I have assembled a pretty comprehensive list of email addresses, so this year I just emailed everyone and before I knew it the kits were gone! 2/3 of them are already back!

The other thing we did this year was use block assembly as the craft for one of our church's MOPS meetings. You may remember that last year the MOPS group made the "Brown Bear" quilt because they wanted to contribute to last year's quilt but that had been already done by someone else who donated it. This year I held back some blocks, and we put them together at their meeting this week. Young future quilters!

Below is a copy of this year's instructions. I saved them for the end because they are only an example and they can be pretty long and boring!

Thank you for agreeing to help assemble this year’s quilt for the Lottie Moon Auction. Here are the directions for putting together a block. But first, a couple of notes to get you started.

1.     These fabrics are batiks. This means that the color has saturated the fabric due to the way they were produced. This makes it hard to tell the right side from the wrong side. I look for sharper edges and slightly brighter colors, but if you think it is too close to call on the center square, everyone else will too, so don’t worry about it.

2.     The ¼ inch seam is imperative, whether you are hand piecing or machine piecing. If you have to draw a line on the back of the fabric to get an exact ¼ inch, please do so. No one will be seeing the back of the quilt top.

3.     One of the fabrics has shades of yellow, green and purplish pink. Your pieces may not look like the picture.

4.     Be careful with the directions the squares are turned when you are assembling the block rows. I had to unsew a little the first time I put this block together. Be more careful than I was.

5.     Also, if you are machine sewing, you don’t have to backstitch the ends. If you are hand sewing, you do need to put in knots.

Okay, on to the real directions. This block is technically a nine-patch block. It is made of 9 squares of fabric sewn together. In this case, 8 of the 9 squares are made up of triangles. These are the ones you have to make sure are turned correctly when sewing them together.

Here is an example of the 9 squares, in no particular order:

Now it is time to really get down to business. You will be sewing together three rows of three squares each, and then joining them to complete the block.

When sewn together, the first row looks something like this:

The first row seams should be pressed away from the center square. Please try to keep the diagonal seams from the triangles flat under the vertical seams you sewed. You may need to use a pencil tip or something to keep it in place while you press so that you don’t burn your fingers.

Row 2 looks like this when you have assembled it:

For the second row, press your seams toward the center square

The third row will look like this:

 

In the third row, please press your seams away from the center square, being careful to keep the diagonal seams as flat as possible again.

Now that you have the three rows sewn, you can sew them together in exactly the order they are pictured above. Because some of the seams are pressed toward the center and some away from the center, you should be able to butt the seams up against each other pretty tightly.  When you have sewn the rows together, press those seams both in the same direction, either toward the top or toward the bottom of the block. (If you are making more than one block, alternate some of the blocks so that some are pressed toward the top and some toward the bottom.)

Your final block should measure 9 ½ inches square and should look pretty much like this:

Making a Group Quilt, Part 3 - Cutting

Once those first major decisions have been made, it is time to move on to cutting. On the first quilt, I did all the cutting. If you read this blog regularly, you may realize what a bad idea that was. I do not feel like I am good at cutting, and I do not enjoy cutting. (Just wondering, does anybody?) I think we made many more blocks for that quilt than we might have had to because of my poor cutting skills. (That particular quilt called for many 2 1/2" strips which I could now do with my Accuquilt Go! cutter and be much more accurate!)

The second quilt was much more accurately cut by the person known as Supercutter Stephanie. (Why do I call her that? When she was cutting the fabric for the second quilt, she realized that one of her rulers was off by 1/32 of an inch. Whose eyes are that good? I am forever in awe of her.)

On the third quilt, the Log Cabin, Supercutter Stephanie and I split the cutting. Since most of it was 1 1/2" strips, this would be another Accuquilt Go! cut quilt today. She and I also split the cutting of the fourth quilt and the current quilt.

Cutting goes faster when done by more than one person! I'm just saying! (It also goes much faster when done with a die cutter, but I think most of you could figure that part out.)

I haven't known when to mention this, so it is going here. The pattern for this year's block choice had some shapes that would have had to be cut with a template. I do not like cutting with templates. I like it even less than just cutting! Also, as I looked at the directions for piecing the block together, I realized that they were a bit complicated for beginning piecers. Fortunately, I realized after a few hours of staring at it (I am a little slow) that the pieces that needed templates could be done as half square triangles and still look the same from a distance. This was very good news, especially since I was able to purchase a die for the HSTs.

Above is the before HSTs block design. Below is the block made with HSTs. Yes, that is the actual block, fabric and all.

 

This made the cutting faster and the piecing easier for all. I appreciate the cutting speed part, and the person who purchases the quilt will appreciate the fact that the piecing is more accurate so the quilt is more beautiful. The extra seams might be a little bit of a pain when we are hand quilting it, but we will live with that.

Quilt on!

Making a Group Quilt, Part 2 - Beginning Choices

When we started that first quilt, we wanted to make sure that people understood that the quilt that year was under new management. We wanted people to know that we weren't the experienced quilters who had previously made those beautiful quilts. I was probably the most experience and I'd only been quilting for a couple of years. (And yes, this whole thing made me very nervous!) We also wanted to involve as many people as possible in making the quilt, hoping to stave off the dwindling quilters problem.

So one of our first jobs was to decide how to do these things. Before we even chose the pattern, we decided to go with batiks because those had not been used before. We also decided to recruit people (even nonquilters) to put the blocks together. Then we would publicize the hand quilting times, doing some in the afternoon and some in the evening to encourage a wide variety of people to come and quilt. In the year we made the Log Cabin quilt, we asked people to bring in fat quarters (after explaining in church what a fat quarter was) in various shades from cream to brown and lightest green to darkest green.

All of these efforts to involve as many people as possible required making announcements in church. Unlike the rest of the family, I am not fond of microphones. This may have been the most difficult part of these quilts for me.

We needed to move fast on the first quilt, so one other friend and I chose the pattern from one of my quilt books. We chose Repeating Crosses, from the book Encyclopedia of Classic Quilt Patterns by Leisure Arts. We chose it because it was one block (which looked easy!), looked pretty, and what church group wouldn't want to do a pattern called Repeating Crosses?

In subsequent years, we have gotten together as a group sometime between Christmas and the second week of January to choose the pattern for the quilt. (We go out to lunch as part of this!) In early years, we passed around every book and magazine I had. Lately, I have started to narrow down the choices to streamline the process. (Of course, my library has gotten much larger also!) We ended up choosing our second quilt from the same book, a Double Irish Chain. We try to choose something different each year. We chose Double Irish Chain so that we could do some more noticeable quilting in the larger blank spaces. The following year we chose a Log Cabin with an appliqued star in the center of each block because we wanted to make something a little scrappy. The following year it was back to batiks with a quilt from the book Batik Gems by Laurie Shifrin. And last year's quilt was made from a top donated by the mother of one of our church members.

Some things we have learned about choosing a pattern over the years are:

1. Be careful about bias seams. The Repeating Crosses block is almost all bias seams. This was not a smart way to begin our career. I cannot tell you how many extra blocks we had to make because of varying sizes and stretched seams. (We did, however, use the extra blocks in pillow shams, so they did not go to waste.)
2. Be careful about how many seams there are per block. The Log Cabin block was a bit of a nightmare because there were so many seams that if a couple were sewn a bit off, the whole block was off. (I actually ripped and resewed many of those blocks.) We also had more people return unfinished blocks on that Log Cabin than any other quilt.
3. When possible choose a pattern where one or two people can do some strip piecing. The Double Irish Chain quilt could have been much more difficult if we hadn't used strip piecing. This year's quilt is mostly HSTs. It just made sense (to avoid bias problems and consistency problems) to have one person sew all those HSTs into little squares before passing out block kits for assembly.

The next big choice is, of course, fabric. Everyone on the quilt email list is invited, but the most people we've ever really had are 4 or 5. The truth is I have twice chosen the fabric all by myself. Luckily both times involved the batiks and colors I love. We have learned a few things about this process also.

1. People loved the year we went scrappy and they could donate fat quarters. More people were able to get involved even if they were not able to sew or hand quilt. 
2. Even though our quilts are sold at a Christmas auction, Christmas fabrics (or colors people associate with Christmas) do not seem to bring in as much money.
3. Batiks are very popular.

Now that you have made your way through this long post, here are some pictures of the last five quilts:

 Repeating Crosses

 Double Irish Chain

 Log Cabin with Stars

 Our Batik Gem (All Tucked In was the official pattern name, I think.)

 Ruby's Christmas Stars

Making a Group Quilt, Part 1 - History

I thought I would give you a brief history of our church auction quilts before starting to give you some of the wisdom I have gained about making a group quilt with people who are not quilters. I will split it up into a couple different posts, so maybe it won't be so boring as if it were all in one post.

Our church holds an auction on the first Friday in December each year to raise money for the Lottie Moon Christmas offering. For more than 20 years, a quilt has been made and hand quilted to be auctioned off as one of the main draws for the auction. The amounts brought in by these quilts have ranged from $500 to $2200.

Up until 5 quilts ago (well, 6 if you count the one for this year which we've just begun), the quilts were planned and mostly made by women from the generation before mine. Yes, there were a few other people like me (and even a couple of women younger than I) who helped out, but it was all planned by these lovely women. They did much of their work at the church, but as the church grew, it became impossible to have a room set aside for the quilting frame, so they began doing the actual quilting at one of the women's homes.

Here are some pictures of the quilts they made:

This last one is one I really wished I could afford! It was stunning. These pictures are (obviously) scanned from one of the lovely ladies' scrapbook. Obviously these are not all of the quilts.

One summer day (when I was on vacation from teaching) I walked into the room where they were working. The ladies there thought that I was just there to say hi and were absolutely thrilled when I asked if there was anything I could do to help. That year's quilt was a Cathedral Window, so there were parts I could take home to work on and bring back. By the end of that afternoon, one of the women (who I consider my Quilt Mom) and I had arranged for her to meet with a group of us younger working women every Tuesday evening to work on showing us how to make theses blocks. Between all of us women, we made enough Cathedral Windows to make a twin sized quilt and two Christmas tree skirts, one of which is carefully stored with my Christmas decorations.

The following year I learned hand quilting during the summer while working on that year's quilt. Of course, lots of the working women couldn't quilt during the afternoon and the older women weren't excited about driving at night, so afternoons were the only quilting time available. 

Because the original quilters were the generation before mine and because there was no way for women who worked or cared for children during the day to help with the quilting, you can guess what happened. The quilting group got smaller and smaller, until the last year that before I became the quilt project manager, there were really only three women doing the actual hand quilting. 

The following February one of the women mentioned to me that they were not making a quilt that year. They had not told the pastor yet, so I figured I'd better tell him, thinking he might think that it was an opportunity to move in another direction. One look at his face told me that that was not going to be the case, and somehow I found myself assuring him that there would be a quilt.

In future posts, I will discuss how we planned that quilt, lessons we have learned, and how we have refined the process. Maybe someone out there can benefit from our learning curve.

First I will cover how we choose the quilt pattern and fabric. In the following post, I'll cover different ways we've found to involve as many people as possible - this includes the block assembly and arrangement. Then I'll cover the layering, quilting, and binding. In each post, I'll mention lessons learned and how we have improved the process as the years have passed. And, yes, there will be pictures.

We Have a Winner

I used the random number generator at RANDOM.ORG to determine that comment number 3 is the winner! So, funtalkermitts, congratulations and watch your email for your subscription to The Quilt Show.

And thank you all for your comments. A new post is in the works and will be up within the next day or so.

Quilt on!

Post Number 200 - A Giveaway

Welcome to my 200th post! Yes, it is a Friday, maybe not so much a usual posting day, but I do want to get this announcement to you. And, yes, that is all this post is about!

I have a 6 month subscription to The Quilt Show to give away to some lucky person. I know that I haven't used my own subscription quite as much as I would like to, but that is about to change since I know that I can watch it on my iPad while I work on my quilting or pressing or cutting. I do know that the shows I have watched, I have loved. If you've never tried it out, maybe now is the perfect time.

To be entered, just comment on this post before the 11:59 PM EST on Friday, February 24th. I will use the handy dandy random number generator to choose the winner and announce it on Saturday the 25th.

I am trying to decide whether a series of posts about how I organize our church's annual auction quilt would be at all interesting to anyone or whether it would just be more typing in the wind. I know there are books and articles about such things, but most of them are about making a quilt with a group of quilters, whereas most of the people who work on our quilt are not quilters and we attempt to get as many people involved as possible. Let me know if you are interested and...

Quilt on!

Today's Accomplishments

Well, another day of work. We had staff meeting today, so that took up a bit of my time. And I still had more people to catch up with so... I still didn't get a whole lot of sewing done. But I did get eight of these done:

 

Of course, I still have forty more to go. And the pressing and the trimming. These will be added to all 12 of the blocks for this quilt. And the flash really washed out the fabric in this picture.

I guess I could sew these more quickly by machine, but if I have machine sewing time, I'd like to be working on my paper piecing project. And if I'm sewing by hand at home, I'd like to spend as much of that time hand quilting the big WIP in the Basement. To slow things down a bit, it looks like I will be helping with a big project at work in addition to my regular duties so... less sewing time. But I'm not complaining! I like my job and like the idea of being more helpful there. 

That being said, I still hope to have two big finishes in the next month or so. Actually, there is every possibility that I could complete 4 bed sized quilts (3 queens and a twin) in the first 6 months of this year! Whew! I will be so amazed with myself! (Of course, it hasn't actually happened yet.)