At the Maker Fair

The VMQG had a booth at the Maker Fair that was held in Vancouver early in the summer.

Here's the booth with a couple of challenge quilts hung way up high, the demo table, a design wall where people rearranged hst blocks and a rack of quilts to oooo and aaaah over.

Several of us did 45 minute demos right through the day and people really seemed to enjoy us piecing and quilting.  I was working on my Bottled Rainbow challenge blocks and others did paper piecing, hand quilting, strip piecing...

vmqg maker faire 8, a photo by crafty_dame on Flickr.

We were very low tech compared to the computer booths, robots, remote cars, walking vehicles, led lights and all the other mad technologies that were being displayed.

My Personal Quilt Challenge

Here's my challenge. I'm going to finish one quilt a month until all the tops I've got stacked up are quilted.

This blog is where I'm going to monitor my progress.

I think I have about 15 quilt tops stored in various boxes and in various piles just waiting to be quilted. Some have been there for 12 years now. The oldest is probably a pinwheel one I made from all my dress shirts that I cut up when I quit my job at the Royal Bank. The newest is from yesterday when I tried to figure out how to do Oh, Fransson!'s chopped vegetables block.

I took my friends Ross and Lawanda to the Ladner Quilt and Car Show (you know something for the ladies and something for their husbands). Nothing spectacular there quilt-wise, but I ran into Paula from the Vancouver Modern Quilt Guild, and she mentioned that another guild she was in did a UFO (un-finished objects) challenge. It goes something like this. Everyone takes a photo of an unfinished object and "registers" it with the guild for 5 dollars. You register as many UFOs as you want. Then you have a date about 3-6 months down the road to get all your UFOs finished. For each UFO one you finish, you qualify for a prize or are put in a draw for fabulous prizes.

Here's the first big UFO that I have finished since joining the Vancouver Modern Quilt Guild.
My inspiration came from buying a great bundle of half yards in green on Etsy. While on vacation, I added more greens and ended up with about 10 different fabrics. I added in three solids - two greens and one orange, since 5 of the fabrics had a bit of orange in them.

I really like the regimented repeating triangles in this layout. I think it makes the quilt look very graphic and modern.

I like making the backs inter-esting, so I do some piecing there too. Usually it's a lot more free form, but this one I drew out and had to keep calculating how many hst I would need for each diamond. I spaced them out and made several sizes of diamonds for the back and am very pleased with how it turned out.

I call the quilt Half Square Triangle Variations 2010.