Many Hands

I feel like I have as small army of quilters busy creating quilt tops for Quilts for Survivors (probably because I do!); it's so wonderful to see how all of my quilting buddies are into. On Friday three of us got together for a day of sewing and to work our collective selves into a bit of a lather over all the additional flimsies we could potentially make.

A few years back Anne made these trees blocks using the Tole Christmas pattern (it's a free download from Moda) for a fundraiser to help folks in Australia who were ravaged by wildfires, so she wanted to make a complete quilt this time around. They are fun and when made up scrappy the variety of fabrics makes for a beautiful forest.

I had spent a few days prepping green and teal strips and she cut the whites, so we were ready to get the pedals to the metal right from the get go. Jane used her talents to keep us moving things along - prepping layouts for the trees as strips came together. 

You make the trees in two halves, a left and a right side. We agreed that the pattern could be rewritten to use a single strip of white and a single green rather than several different sized whites in the same strip, to simplify things.

Anne is a painter so we used her easel, which is on wheels, to hold her small design wall; it was perfect! Might need one of these....

Being able to see four blocks at a time (they finish at 14" x 16") was a big help in ensuring that the location of the strips was a random as possible.

Jane was also kept busy drawing diagonal lines and assembling colour combinations for me. It make such a huge difference when you can just sit down and sew and press and have all of that organizational work done for you - perfect when production is the name of the game.

I had cut pink and orange strips and neutral squares for a pattern that I believe is called Pineapple Blossom, another scrappy one. After several were together I switched over to trees as they took longer to assemble, which allowed us to see real progress on that front; by the end of the day strips for all 12 blocks were made and half of the blocks were sewn together. Many hands really do make light work.

I'll share more about my quilt the next time around....M