June 2016 Meeting Recap

Our June meeting was a great success! Thank you to Katie for leading a paper piecing demo, many of our members completed their blocks! We had some wonderful submissions for our Botanical Gardens Challenge, very excited to see everyone's interpretations! Our June BOM is the Wheel of Fortune block, templates can be found here. Sharon would like two shades of bright, primary colors. Backgrounds are white/white on white/offwhite.

The guild decided upon the Lemoyne Star as our theme for our next Quilt Show with the Sewing & Quilting Expo at Lakeland next spring. We started a Pinterest page for ideas and tutorials. If you would like to 'pin' to our board, send Ellen your Pinterest email and she will add you to the group.  At our July meeting we will have a demonstration of how to make the block in the traditional and cheater methods.  Our theme is to take the Lemoyne Star block and modernize it. Change it up: colors, scale, piecing, etc.  The next MQG webinar is perfect for inspiration for our show: Making Traditional Modern. Members can read more and register here. The webinar is June 22nd, which will be recorded to be viewed at a later date if needed. We originally were going to have our July meeting as just the fun swap and Lemoyne  demo. However, I'm sure you all have seen at this point the news from the OrlandoMQG. National has now assisted them in their call and they are asking for heart blocks and quilts to donate to the victims and families from this past month's tragedy. We have decided to open up the July meeting as a Sew Day as well. You can sew heart blocks, you can sew blocks into quilts from finished blocks, you can cut Backings or Bindings. Or you can stay to sew a project that you need help with or just need to finish. Either way we would love everyone to stay and sew. Thanks to Anita, we now have the meeting room until 3pm.  See you all in July! ~Ellen

May 2016 Meeting Recap

Welcome to our May Recap! We had a wonderful meeting with great show and tells.  Congrats to Katie for being on WFLA Daytime, talking about modern quilting! You can watch her segment on her website HERE.  Ann shared her new job quilting for Florida Quilting Center within Happy Apple Quilts, super excited for her! For our next guild challenge, we need to choose the theme for our next Sewing Expo Quilt Show!  Members at the meeting agreed upon the concept of taking a traditional block and making it modern. Altering it, making it larger, reversing it, the ideas are plentiful. But we have to choose a block first! Bring a print out of the block to the June meeting for members to choose from. A black and white photocopy is just fine, but make sure it is on paper so we don't have to pass a lot of phones around!  Members chose this so everyone can pick their own color scheme, but we do want to stick with bright, modern colors and fabrics. Have a fabric you want to use and not sure if it will 'fit'? Bring it the meeting and we can see!

Member be sure to check your emails from national!  The class catalog is supposed to be sent tomorrow, June 1st, for QuiltCon in Savannah on February 23-26.  If you decide to go, get your hotel early! Bring your sewing machine in June! Katie will be leading a Paper Piecing Demo at our June meeting.  Get the fabric requirements here.  I will show how to work the national MQG site, since its been a while since we used it. Sharon will share her block for our BOM.  Early reminder that July is our Holiday party! We will have to discuss snacks for sharing. And bring a handmade present to swap in July, you may  need to start sewing something now! Wrap it up like it's Christmas, or better yet wrap it in fabric! See you all soon.

Tampa MQG at the Lakeland Sewing Expo 2016!

This past March our guild had their very first quilt show, at the Lakeland Sewing and Quilting Expo!  We were incredibly lucky and honored with the spots for our quilts to hang, right in the main entrance!  Our guild decided to create our own "Think Spring" Challenge, creating a quilt that each member found a relationship to spring.  As our members walked by we secretly listened in to other quilters admiring our work.  We even had a few people ask for us, to learn more about our specific guild.  We hung and took down the exhibit ourselves, learning with great assistance from the ladies of the expo and the convention hall.Glad we were able to share our take on modern quilting with other quilters in the area, and learn more about us! We were even included in the program.  And by luck's chance, our QuiltCon Group Charity Quilt arrived back to us two days before the show.  It was able to be our star, right by registration.

March & April 2016 Meeting Recap

Tampa MQG Members decided to work on a charity quilt early this year!  Our guild created a quilt for the Love Quilt Project.  Their base design for the quilt asked to create a log cabin pattern.  The center squares were drawn by children from Cardinal Elementary in Springfield, Virgina.  Our guild decided to create a rainbow design, everyone bringing in bright scarps to use.  We were able to construct the entire top in a meeting and one member offered to quilt for us. It is now on its way to Virgina, and soon after to Africa.





Our April meeting took us outside before the full on Florida heat sets in.  We took a field trip to the USF Botanical Gardens.  We have decided to have a new guild challenge, with inspiration from the gardens.  Our June meeting will be full of color as we see our members inspirations come to fabric.

February 2016 Meeting ReCap

We want to thank everyone for coming to our new meeting location at the Jimmie B. Keel library.  We know our meeting location cannot be the best for everyone possible, but we hope this creates a more central location easier for most.  We are booked at the library for March 12, April 9, and May 14. Thanks to Anita for booking us in!  We hope to grow our members and do more sew days, either making charity quilts, learning new techniques, or challenges! We had fun this month learning tessellation from Flo.  Thanks to Flo for handing out the flannel squares to create her shamrock-esque blocks for next month!  Dianne is up for our March BOM.  We do need a volunteer for April's block. We received nearly all of our quilts to hang at the expo.  A few last minute sleeves need to hang and then we will be ready!  I am super excited for our exhibit next month at Lakeland Sewing Expo.

In March we will be creating the blocks for our Love Quilt Project.  Our members decided to create a rainbow of stripes with the children's art blocks.  Remember for next meeting to bring BRIGHT colors of fabrics for the strips.  Katie offered to bring her AccuQuilt Go to help cut the 2 1/2" strips we will be using.  As it is we will need the most of our 'white' areas.  We will be using white, tone on tone white, and low volume prints for these sections. Bring some fabric precut so we can get started as soon as we are there!

For those coming next month and want to let others know if they are bringing an iron/ironing board, extension cables, and etc please let us know in the Facebook event group page. Remember lots of fabrics for next month, bring your sewing machines, and supplies!  Let's see if we can get a quilt top done in three hours!

January 2016 Meeting ReCap

Welcome back to all those who joined us this month, we hope we have a grand quilty year! Some big news: MEETING LOCATION CHANGING. Due to our member size, we will no longer be meeting at Crafty Threads.  We want to thank Barb for all of her time and space at Crafty Threads, for letting us meet there for over the past year.  However leadership has decided we need more space!  We will now be meeting at the Jimmie B Keel Library on Bearrs Ave. For our longer lasting members, we are returning to where we used to meet!  In the past this was a more central meeting location, which we hope it returns to being. The library community rooms gave us ample space for working and having fun. Meeting times and days remain the same.

At our January meeting we began collecting quilts for our show at the Lakeland Sewing Expo in March. We have 13 quilts promised so far.  Let's hit 20!  Every member is welcome to submit a quilt to hang at the show. Your quilt must have a hanging sleeve on the back. When submitting the quilt we will give you a submission form to sign. In addition, please email Ellen BY the February meeting your quilt name, your name, and a description of the quilt.  We need to get the label information to the expo a month in advance of the show.

UFOs are now CEOs, Completely Executed Objects! If you didn't bring your fat quarters for our CEO game, still bring them!  Our first drawing for completing these will be given at the April meeting.  Bring as well any old projects you wish to swap with other members. I hope the new year brings you all lots of quilting time and fresh starts, see you next month at the library!

November 2015 Meeting ReCap

It's December. It may not look like it or feel like it, but the year is quickly coming to a close. Our guild accomplished a lot this year and I am very proud of where we have come. We have grown in size about 10 members this year, which to us is a huge percentage! Thank you to all who have continued to support each other with our guild and quilting. Our QuiltCon Charity quilt went so well together. We donated 64 pillowcases to Miles for Smiles and at our last count had 9 quilts for Project Linus.

At the November meeting we voted in our officers for 2016. President: Ellen A. VicePresident: Flo M. Treasurer: Anita A. Secretary:  Sandy M. In the coming week we will be paying our renewal with National.

We have thought of some fun new guild activities for us to do in 2016. There were 13 of 19 UFOs completed by our members this year. The rest of those can roll on over, if you wish!  We will continue the UFO Challenge and have a fat quarter as your ante for each UFO submission. Going along with the UFO Challenge, we have decided to do a UFO Swap.  For the January meeting, along with your list of UFOs, bring a UFO that you just don't want to look at anymore!  Something you started and have no desire to finish.  We will swap with other members and have a secondary challenge to complete or re-purpose the UFO in 2016. We also want to introduce Quilting Resolutions.  Instead of focusing on the past, lets look to the future!  What do you want to learn? What do you want to accomplish?  We will pass slips around at the meeting for you to fill out about your quilty hopes for 2016.  We will use these to help develop content and activities for our meetings.   As always, any of our guild activities are completely voluntary.  But we do want to remind you of our Think Spring Quilt Show in the Lakeland Sewing Expo!  Please bring finished quilts to the January meeting so we can have a final count to give the expo. Lakeland will be making the display signs for us.  I hope everyone has a wonderful holiday with lots of quilting!