The Wonderful World of Online Quilters

For me this all started in January when I joined Facebook. I knew about FB because of my 20 year old daughter and my 18 year old son. I soon discovered that it was a great way to reconnect with old friends and keep up with current ones. Then one day I did a search for something like "quilting" and found that there are quilt groups on FB. That's when I discovered the Kaffe Fassett Collective on FB and posted a couple of pictures of my quilts. Suddenly, people that I'd never met before were asking to be my friend. It seemed a little strange to me, but then I got to see their quilts and their quilt groups, and suddenly I was asking to be friends with other quilters and fabric designers from around the world. One day I realized that some of them had blogs. I had never even looked at a blog before, but this was even more quilty and fabulous. And from one such lovely blog I found a Flickr group, the Half Hexagon Quilt-a-long, started by comfortstitching (see blogs I'm following). Another lovely, lovely quilter and friend from FB is also in the quilt-a-long, Cathy Underhill (cabbage quilts -- also see blogs I'm following). Their work is so inspiring to me!

So -- you can see my progress on the quilt-a-long. The pictures will probably be stacked up above these paragraphs because I still can't figure out a better way to do it, and I seem to have little to no time to figure it out right now. One day soon I will get it straightened out and will probably be extremely embarrassed at how simple it is. I decided to put together a "make do" type of quilt for the quilt-a-long. That is, no fun trips to the fabric store for more fabrics. I wanted to use up fabric from my stash. I started with 2-1/2 inch strips left over from a quilt I put together for my daughter a few years ago. After the layout, my daughter and I decided it would be a great quilt for her dorm room, but she has had a more mellow color scheme, so we had to pull a few out and replace (with more Amy Butler :). So, many changes later, we have a whole different quilt on our hands, and I actually ended up with more trapezoids than when I started. So, yes, I'm going to be making at least two quilts and probably some pillows that my new Flickr group friend (sleighd -- who also makes amazing quilts) showed me how to do with a pictorial tutorial (I like how that sounds :). So, apparently I am an overachiever! I always did like extra credit!