Time to Take Some Names - Group Quilt 2013

I apologize to anyone who just fainted dead away to realize the 2013 Group Quilt project, much hinted and teased at mercilessly over the last few months, is finally ready for participants. I sure hope someone can find you some smelling salts, because I don't want you to miss out.

A bit of a sneak peak:

Man alive, this one almost killed me. I feel like I say that a lot. I think what it is is that because I am a "see it in my head, transfer it to fabric" designer, there are so many places between vision and reality where things can get completely snafu-ed, and if such a place exists, oh you know I will find it. Add in that this particular project looks NOTHING like what it started out as in my head, and this may go down in history as my craziest design process yet.

And it really has only just begun.

Every time I run one of my group projects aka "Duping Testers Into Thinking They Are Just Making a Quilt When In Fact They Are Testing My Directions As Well As Making A Quilt For My Plays Well With Others Lecture", I start out by thinking "How can I make this mutually beneficial to both myself and my minions?", and I'd like to think that I am improving it for the minions each time. For the first crack at a group project, you were all given the opportunity to make some blocks for me and have a thank you in my pattern. Wow. How very generous of me.

The second and third times I took it up a notch and had you make me some blocks, and make several more to be swapped among you so that everyone ended up with a little "quilt starter" as well as the final pattern at the end. This was very well received by all who participated, and I love that one quilter even told me it all reminded her of "that friendship bread starter everyone had at the back of their refrigerator in the 70s".

This time I'm going all out. Not only will you get blocks to start a quilt of your own, you will get enough blocks for an entire twin sized quilt top. I am slightly nuts, I know, but I'm so excited about this and I hope you will be too.

In short, each participant will  choose a 2 or 3 tone color scheme, provide background fabric, and will make 9" (finished) scrappy triangle blocks for 8 other quilters between 2/1 and 3/5. One set of triangles can be knocked out in about one hour, so in total the sewing portion of this project should take you about 8 hours, and I am giving you 5 weekends in which to accomplish this.As you can see, I have chosen lime green for my background and black and white scraps for my other fabrics.

Don't be scared of bias. These triangles are ALMOST all straight edge!


Some things you should know before declaring your intent to participate:

1. You will need to buy 3 1/2 yards of background fabric. Or find it in your stash. Either way, you will need it to participate.

2. Before you can start sewing, there is a modest amount of prep work (details outlined in the actual directions) which involves preparing kits of background fabric for each other person working on your quilt. So yes, you will have to buy background fabric, and then cut 48 strips (24 2" wide, 24 1" wide) out of it. That should take you about 30 minutes tops if you aren't drinking at the time. This prep work needs to be done and in the mail to me by 1/28/13 so that I can swap projects around and make sure everyone has 8 other people's quilts to work on .

3. Which brings us to the mail. You will be required to spend about $15 - 25 in postage costs, which will include one USPS Priority Mail flat envelope (5.15) and sending the finished blocks to 8 different quilters. I know you are thinking "OMG, why isn't SHE spending that money," and I assure you I will be spending at least $100 shipping you each your packets of projects to work on, as I will be using USPS Priority Mail as well.  I learned during "Diamond Dazzle" that these projects can cost me a fortune in postage, and unfortunately I need to share the burden a bit on this one.

4. You will also need8 ziplock-style gallon sized bags, and 8 manilla mailing envelopes.

5. The scraps for the quilts you will work on will come from your stash; you may have to augment here and there, but if you tell me what kinds of scraps you are drowning in I will do my best to match you up with like minded individuals.

So I am hoping I didn't scare you off! This will be monetarily and time commitment wise a bit more involved than my previous swaps, but since at the end you will get enough blocks to put toether the entire quilt, I hope it doesn't seem too out of line.

 Because of the scope of this project and the strict timeline, I am limiting the participants to 20, and am hoping to get at least eight so that we can all get a twin sized quilt.

I'll be happy to forward the official guidelines to anyone who might want more information, so just contact me at evapaigequilts@charter.net asap!