Thursday, September 30, 2010

St. Anthony's Quilters

St. Anthony's Quilters - Day 1
Today, is the first day of the St. Anthony's Church hand quilters group.  For our first quilt, we're quilting the LeMoyne Star quilt from a pattern featured on the cover of a Marsha McCloskey book.   Remember I pieced this during the month of March and blogged about it. 

I was so pleased that Doris K. from the St. Dunstan's Quilters, and Linda G. from the Friday girls came to help us load the quilt onto the frame.  We carefully pinned on the backing to the long poles, then we laced twine through the holes in the side poles attaching the sides of the backing.  Then we laid the batting over and smoothed it all out flat.   Then carefully laid the quilt on top and smoothed and pinned around the perimeter.  We hand based it too, for extra security.  All that took over an hour...  That was all pretty exciting, and then it was time to stitch.

Doris gave us all some instruction on how to thread our needle with just the nicest small knot.  Then she showed us how to rock our needle to take some stitches.    The seven of us then sat around the 4 sides of the quilt and stitched.   We had such nice conversations while stitching. Every once in a while, one of us would get under the quilt to look at the nice lines of stitching.    Ahh, it was a lovely afternoon.

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

The quilt is going to be so gorgeous. Everyone seems to be having such fun quilting. Quilters truly are a special breed. Lucy

Dolores said...

I've never seen one laced onto boards. How strong are the boards? They don't look very wide or thick. We use 1" X 3" boards, staple fabric onto it and then pin the backing onto it. That way we can unpin and adjust if things don't work out the first time.

Anonymous said...

It was lots of fun. Thanks for the invite Gail. Linda G

Donna's chitchat said...

What an amazing process. People just don't understand the amount of love and care that goes into a handmade stitched quilt. Actually, even a machine quilted quilt for that matter...

It is beautiful. I would certain by tickets on that beauty!