What a fantastic day!  Saturday was simply wonderful.  Not only was it National Quilting Day, but the MSP Quilting Angels celebrated their fourth anniversary.  And what a way to do it! We gathered all the quilts we’d made over the past few months and took them to the Church for a blessing.  What a glorious sight it was too.  A total of 59 quilts were turned in along with about a dozen dolls from Sarah.  And it was so much fun to see all the different designs and see some finished quilts from our “Block of the Month.” And we also had 5 finished quilts from our confirmation group with a sixth in progress.

After church we carried them all over to the Parish Center for photographing and the ladies started the task of sewing on labels and placing the soldier quilts into the quilt bags.  Nancy is delivering our children’s quilts to the Candlelighters group.  Next time we may ask them to come in so you all can meet them.  Jean will be arranging the delivery to Baltimore.  Several of you asked about going along so please let Jean know if you are interested.  She’ll have a date set up for sometime in April.

A group of 12 Confirmation kids joined us to create quilts.  There were a few kids that I believe we’ve inspired to continue to sew and become the next generation of quilters. We’ve decided that we may try and set up a day to sew with the Confirmation kids once a quarter in months where there’s an extra Saturday so that our regular quilt days are not disrupted.  If you enjoyed helping the kids, let us know so that we can keep you in the loop with upcoming dates starting in the fall.

This time we were joined with some new faces.  We welcome Malinda Boyd, Sally O’Brien and Amy Tong.  Malinda got busy creating some blocks of the month. Amy and Sally spent most of the day sorting out one of the scrap bins we had.  And it was great to get that organized.  Sue took one look at what they’d done and decided to take it home and iron all the fabric.  That got me thinking!  Perhaps next month (April 25) we can have a day of creating squares with triangles.  If you’re in the middle of a project, I’d say go ahead and work on that.  But if you would like a day of just creating blocks we can start to create quilts from all those scraps.  You know me, I like scrappy!  We can create a few quilts just made of triangles.  But the triangles can also be used in borders for many of the quilts we normally work on, bear paw quilts and many other blocks.  So having a supply of them would be great.  I’ve been doing that with a lot of my scraps at home.  My favorite technique is to cut two squares of 4” blocks.  Place them right sides together and draw a line on the diagonal.  Then draw two sewing lines ¼” on either side of the diagonal line.  Sew those two seams.  Press with an iron.  Cut on the diagonal line.  And press open.  You’ve seen the technique with the block of the month for March (Maple Leaf).  And you’ll also see it with our block of the month for April, which should be ready next week.  I can also demo it for you on the 25^th.  You can do this with any size block.  I’ve chosen to start with a 4” block because of the size of most of the scraps.  But we could create a variety of block sizes.

We also welcome back Ann Marie O’Lone.  It’s been awhile but she’s rejoined the group.  She not only quilts but has created these lovely bunnies and cats from fleece.  These would be a great addition to our dolls.  I’m told they can also be provided to police departments and fire departments to be given to kids who end up being transported in police cars and ambulances to provide comfort.  I think they’d also be great for the Candlelighters group.  Mary, we’d love to see you back creating your bears!