November 2012 Meeting

We met at Helen's house on Tuesday, November 20 with Peggy, Margie, Randi, Helen, Ellie, Rita, and Tricia attending. Dawn is still visiting her parents and will be there indefinitely, although we hope she will return home periodically and be able to attend our meetings. Linda was in the air during our meeting, on her way to Tennessee to visit her daughter Mollie. We missed them both. Our meetings are just not the same when even a single Bee is missing.

For dinner, Margie brought a chicken salad casserole topped with potato chips and cheese. Yum! Tricia brought salad, and Rita brought pumpkin spice cake with vanilla ice cream for dessert. 

During dinner, our discussion focused on Thanksgiving preparations and Thanksgiving memories from the past. As usual, we shared both hilarious and touching stories about our families. 

Christmas Party

Talk then turned to our Christmas party, when we should have it, and a theme for this year. We decided that the date for our usual meeting, Tuesday, December 18, was a good day for the Christmas party. Margie suggested using the Bees' travels during the year as a theme and the group jokingly came up with the idea of celebrating a Jewish-Italian Christmas. Of course Peggy, who had just returned from her trip to Israel, pointed out there is no such thing as Jewish Christmas, so we decided it would be a Jewish-Italian Winter Holiday. After a lot of giggling, we actually thought of some food items we could bring:

• Rita: Antipasto and hummus
• Helen: Matzo ball soup
• Linda: Tabouli salad
• Margie: Israeli beef stew
• Peggy: Lasagne
• Tricia: Challah bread, garlic bread, and sparkling cider
• Randi: Dessert (probably tiramisu)
• Ellie: Upside-down creme brulee (actually, her fabulous flan)

We will do our usual $10, round-robin gift exchange. Everyone will draw a number and we will pick presents starting with #1. After that, each Bee, in numerical order, can either pick a new present or "steal" one that's already open (but cannot take back the same gift immediately after it's been stolen from her). A gift can only be swapped three times, i.e., after the third swap, the person who took it gets to keep it. 

Sweatshirt Workshop

Will be held on Saturday, December 1 from 10 AM to 4 PM at the Cooperative Extension meeting room in Carson City. Bring machines, irons, etc. Each Bee should bring her own bag lunch, drinks, snacks, etc. See the Sweatshirt Workshop tab at the top of the blog for detailed information. It's highly recommended that you cut your fabric before the workshop; otherwise, you'll spend a good deal of time at the workshop cutting instead of sewing. 

Nevada Quilt Guild

In September, the Bees decided to withdraw from the Nevada Quilt Guild, and Randi reported that since that time, other groups and individual members have dropped, too. The guild is really struggling, and it's unclear what the outcome will eventually be. Randi remains in contact with some of the former members, so we'll see what happens during the upcoming year. 

Donation Quilts

Our plan had been to invite the director of the domestic violence shelter to our October meeting to present her with the quilts, but since we did not have an October meeting, that didn't happen. We decided to put off completion of this project until January when we will make plans for the coming year. Please bring finished quilts to the January meeting, and we will decide at that time what to do with them.

Show and Tell

Peggy experimented with making a rag quilt from the fabric samples we received in September. It proved to be an arduous task, taking much longer than she expected. The resulting few squares ended up being stiff and heavy. Peggy does not recommend this method for using the fabric samples.

As usual, Peggy was busy with all kinds of projects.

Randi found this old log cabin quilt at a second hand shop. It needs some work to be restored, but it appears to be made from silk. She is looking for just the right fabric to use for backing.

Another project of Randi's. This is actually one giant square that comes out to be the size of a quilt.

Margie made a table runner and free-motion quilted it. Yay, Margie!

October 2012 Meeting

This meeting was canceled.

September 2012 Meeting

We met on September 18 at Helen's house as usual with Peggy, Helen, Ellie, Linda, Rita, Randi, Margie, and Tricia attending. We really missed Dawn, who was visiting her parents in California. We had a delicious and very healthy dinner of ratatouille with fresh garden vegetables, salad, and rice.

Nevada Quilt Guild

For our first item of business, we revisited our involvement as charter members of the Nevada Quilt Guild. Given the expense of maintaining our membership (including the obligation to make a gift basket for the quilt show), the small size of our group, and continual pressure on the Bees from the guild officers to become individual members of the guild, we decided to drop our membership. Randi will communicate with the guild officers to let them know our decision.

Shop Hop

We all shared experiences from the Shop Hop. Margie did the bus tour, which covered all Shop Hop stores over a period of two days. Margie thought the tour was really well done with the bus group spending about 45 minutes at each store. Other Bees visited some of the shops but did not get to all of them. Three of the Bees won prizes in the shop drawings: Margie won a prize from Sylvia's Quilters' Quarters in Yerington; Tricia won from Sierra Sewing in Reno; and Peggy won from Sew 'n Such in Reno. No one had yet picked up their prizes, so we don't know what kind of goodies they will receive. Those are pretty good stats, though, for three members of our small group to win a drawing.

Sweatshirt Workshop

The date of the workshop has changed tentatively to Saturday, December 1 from 10:00 AM to 4:00 PM at the Cooperative Extension meeting room in Carson City. Linda needs to check another event she has that day to make sure the times do not conflict.  An alternate date of January 5 was also discussed as a possibility.

Donated Fabric

As a result of the DragonLord project, Linda was contacted by a someone from the battalion whose children had received quilts about whether we were interested in receiving some fabric donations for our group. Information about the fabric was sketchy; at one time, she was told the fabric was cut into 1" x 1" squares; another time they were described as 12" squares.

As a result, Linda was put into contact with a man named Rolando in California. She told him we were certainly interested in fabric donations, and thanked him for his generosity. Rolando then shipped to Linda three large boxes of quilted fabric samples. They look like the type of thing that drapery stores and interior decorators would use to show samples of quilted bedspreads and matching fabric and sheers. There are literally hundreds of these squares in a number of different patterns. Our mission, should we decide to accept it, is to figure out what we can do with these samples. They are oblong in shape, about 9" x 12" in size, and bound or hemmed along the edges. Each square also has a metal grommet in one corner for hanging. We divided up one box of samples, with each Bee taking some for experimentation.

Finishing Up

We then exchanged the box quilts, did show-and-tell, and finished up with delicious turtle brownies brought by Randi.

Peggy made this quilt using Bernina's cutwork tool. It is made from hand-died fabric and is even more beautiful in person.

Linda's loves zen doodling, both on paper and on fabric.  

Rita submitted this quilt to the Pacific International Quilt Show, but unfortunately, the dimensions of it were just slightly too small. What a gorgeous, original piece!