On Thursday January 18th, twelve eager quilters gathered at Island View Suites retirement residence in Arnprior for our second Sew Day to make blocks for the quilt we'll be raffling off at our 2019 quilt show. Mary deVries and Rennie Hickey are the genii behind this project and its stunning paper pieced wedge shaped blocks. 12 wedges will be joined to make a circle of buildings in the "community" this quilt represents. The quilt will be a real eye-catcher. While working in the activity room our group of quilters were visited by residents interested to see our work. We enjoyed pizza from Mama Rosa's for lunch. Thanks to Island View for inviting us to meet without charge. We appreciate the generosity shown to our Guild. Click/tap on a photo in the gallery below to see it in full. Sadly our guild has lost a longtime quilter and guild member Edna Snyder who passed away in December at the age of 90. Obituary Edna and her daughter Marilyn Erskine have been members of our guild since the guild's founding, with her daughter Joyce Murray (our guild treasurer) joining later. Her daughter Jackie has been quilting for many years, and her youngest daughter Lori has just started quilting. Edna was recognized as our Quilter of Distinction at our 2017 quilt show, and she participated in our recent Sew Day in November along with her daughters Joyce Murray and Marilyn Erskine, both members of our guild. Joyce and Marilyn have kindly shared some memories of their mom and her passion for quilting. I remember when Mum started quilting. We didn’t call it quilting then, but just sewing, as she made blankets from old wool coats to keep us warm. Wish I had some of those now. She was always a sewer and would enter shirts, PJs, and dresses in the local (Carberry) fair, and usually win the prizes. My brothers always had matching shirts and PJs, which would be passed on to younger siblings. They never seemed to wear out. It was much later when times became easier and time more available that she started quilting. She was very proud of her hand quilting and for many years it wasn’t a quilt if it wasn’t hand quilted. No wonder it took me so long to take up quilting myself. I knew I would never hand quilt. My daughter Kelly is also a quilter with amazing talent for colour choice and fine work. Mother was proud to have a granddaughter involved in the ‘cult’. -- Joyce Murray For as long as I can remember Mom was a sewer and a quilter, starting out more from necessity than anything else. Cutting out squares from old wool suits, sewing them together, backing this with flannel was the beginning of her love to sew. She grew up during the war years where everything had a use. Clothes were repurposed into our new clothes. I remember a blue pinafore dress made for me which won first prize at the local fair. This was a big deal in the 50's. Mom's Singer Featherweight was always running. Clothes for seven children, home accessories and Christmas gifts. One gift for Christmas that I still have is a reversible red corduroy/black felt skating outfit. (Wish I could still fit that.) So more formal quilting was a natural progression to her love of sewing. After our father died in 1983, she moved back to Arnprior, joined Emmanuel Anglican Church to sing and the Arnprior Quilt Guild to sew. The quilts began to come, fast and furious. In the following years she made no less than sixty full size quilts, many wall hangings and dozens of baby quilts. Her favourites were the most colourful. Every child (7), grandchild (20), and great-grandchild (16), received a piece of her work. Many more quilts for “Quilts of Valour”, women’s shelter, and little preemie quilts for the babies in the neo-natal unit at the Civic Campus of the Ottawa Hospital were sewn. Always busy, criticizing herself if she didn’t have a project on the go. Like all quilters her home was full of material, unfinished patterns and accessories. She used that Singer Featherweight as her main machine until she died. The more modern Husqvarna never did work properly!
The greatest gift our mother gave me was this love of sewing. At ten years of age I received my first sewing machine. She taught me how to copy a pattern and we would sew together at the large kitchen table, she with her Singer and I with my manual machine. By twelve I was allowed to use her Singer. So with Mom's passing, there’s many unfinished projects for us to finish for her. All that material was split up between four daughters and charities. Have we got our work cut out for us! Mom was a true Worker Bee, quietly doing what needed to be done, never expecting anything in return. She loved going out, anywhere, but certainly mostly to material shops. Mom surprised a daughter of mine with her own Singer Featherweight and was quite anxious to know how she liked it. Now there’s another sewer/future quilter in our midst and so the tradition continues. -- Marilyn Erskine Edna's four daughters surprised her with this beautiful family memory quilt for her 90th birthday in April 2017. This gift of love was pieced by Marilyn and Joyce, quilted by Jackie, and Lori helped with the binding. Grandson David Snyder's quilt always hangs in his living room in Australia to remember his grandmother Edna.
Our quilt guild closed out 2017 with our annual Christmas potluck dinner and meeting. As always, there was an extensive and delicious selection of main course foods and desserts. The hall was festively decorated with a Christmas tree and several of our members' Christmas and holiday themed quilts. After dinner we welcomed special guest Reverend Andrew Love of Grace St. Andrew's United Church in Arnprior who introduced us to "Arms for Hugging", a project for the seriously ill that we will be working on in 2018. A huge thank you is extended to all of the guild members who completed wheelchair lap quilts for residents of The Grove Nursing Home in Arnprior. Several of these colourful and creative quilts are pictured below. And a big thank you to guild members who have been making little preemie quilts for the babies in the Rich Little Special Care Nursery at the Civic Campus of the Ottawa Hospital.
by Gwen Pennings Thank you for all the wonderful quilted placemats you made this past fall which I was very honoured to deliver just before Christmas. 15 placemats to the Arnprior Meals on Wheels program to be given with the Christmas meal. 10 placemats to be given with freezer meals to seniors in the Fitzroy Harbour and Constance Bay areas by the West Carleton Community Service Centres in affiliation with the Western Ottawa Community Resource Centre (WOCRC). It took everyone’s individual work to make such a big impact on our community. I want to share this note that I received:
Gwen, I wanted to send an email to express my thanks on behalf of Western Ottawa Community Resource Centre and some lucky seniors in our community for the beautiful placemats made by your quilting group. The last week before Christmas I had the opportunity to deliver meals and soup and your beautiful placemats to many seniors in our community. The placemats added such a warm and personal touch, the seniors who received them were surprised and genuinely pleased someone had gone to so much work to make such a pretty gift for them. I am sure that as those folks sat down to eat their meals over the holidays they were able to look down at those placemats only to be reminded we are a caring community and their day would have been brighter for it. Heidi Wieler Service Coordinator-West Carleton Western Ottawa Community Resource Centre by Gwen Pennings
Thank you for the 16 wonderful quilted wheelchair lap quilts you made this past fall which I was very honoured to deliver for the residents of The Grove Nursing Home in Arnprior just before Christmas. ![]() 'Twas the night before Christmas, Quilters version 'Twas the night before Christmas, And the quilts were not made. The threads were all tangled, the cookies delayed. The stockings weren't hung, the pantry was bare. The poor weary Quilter, was tearing her hair. Stacks of fat quarters, tipped over in streams. Visions of Log Cabins, had turned into dreams. When what to her wondering eyes should appear, But a bus full of quilters with all of their gear. They went straight to work with just a few mutters, Sorting and stitching and brandishing cutters. The patterns emerged from all of the clutter, Like magic the fabrics arranged in a flutter. Log Cabins, Lone Stars, Flying Geese & Bear Tracks Each quilt was a beauty-even the backs. Her house how it twinkled, her quilts how they glowed. The cookies were baking, the stockings were sewed. Their work was all done, so they folded their frames, And packed up their needles, without giving their names. They boarded the bus, and checked the next address. More quilts to be made, another quilter in distress. She heard one voice echo, as they drove out of sight, Happy quilting to all and to all a good night! Author Unknown Donna Sheaves President We saw lots of quilts at this meeting from our guest speaker Sherri Hisey, our own members' show-and-tell, and completed preemie quilts, along with many participants in block-of-the-month and the decorative stitch exchange. And Mary deVries shared some of the work done at the recent sew day for the raffle quilt for our 2019 quilt show. Here are 2 completed "around the town" blocks designed by Mary. Read more about this very productive day in an earlier blog entry. ![]() Sherri Hisey, our guest presenter is a quilt designer with her own company Border Creek Station patterns. Sherri shared with us the importance of balance in a quilt's visual space, how to keep it simple when decoding the math and some basic rules of thumb of quilt designing, and guidelines for setting quilts and borders. Getting it together in a unique and personal way is key to Sherri's distinctive teaching style-- there is always a way to process your creative thoughts and ideas into a finished project just let your imagination soar! We appreciated her very detailed hand out that documents various terms such as coping (the addition of fabric strips that build up or correct sizes of blocks, quilt centres, or borders to achieve a desired size), along with "quilt math". And her tips such as photocopying a quilt pattern in black, white and grey, to really see the design values, and volume (the difference between the lightest and darkest fabrics in a quilt to ensure sufficient contrast), and to help you decide where you need print and solid fabrics. Sherri's quilts showcased a number of her quilt patterns, many of which she brought along to sell. Click/tap an image in the gallery below to see it in full.
![]() The leaves are gone, the sun beds early, and the snow is not far away. I have selected my images for the Presidents challenge, “Sea Side”, my happy place. I’m gathering my fabric and my pattern which I hope to show you soon. Here is the image I have selected from a magazine to inspire my quilt. I hope many of you will participate as well. We are very excited about our guest speaker this month. Sherri Hisey will be at the meeting to speak about settings and borders as well as present a trunk show. You can read more in the programs section of this newsletter. We are pleased to see so many new members. Janet Brownlee has graciously agreed to take on the role of Ambassador to help our new friends get acquainted with the guild offerings and our group. If you see Janet with a new member, please introduce yourself to make our new friends feel more at home and find out about their interest in quilting. If we need to cancel a meeting due to bad weather, we will send out an email around noon to advise the members. Since many of you arrive with a friend, if you see an email about the cancellation, help out others that may not check their email often and let them know. If you personally feel the weather is not good for traveling, your safety must be the first priority, do not venture out to the meeting. Donna Sheaves President Fifteen keen sewers met at Island View Suites retirement residence in Arnprior for a Sew Day on Thursday Nov 16th. We worked at paper piecing wedge shaped blocks for the quilt we will be raffling in 2019. Mary DeVries and Rennie Hickey are the genii behind this project. 12 wedges will be joined to make a circle of buildings in the "community" this quilt represents. I worked on a school, church and house with a double window. The quilt will be a real eye-catcher. While working in the activity room our group of quilters were visited by many residents interested to see our work. We enjoyed pizza and salad from Mama Rosa's. Thanks to Island View for inviting us to meet without charge. We appreciate the generosity shown to our Guild. -- Chris Gordon Click/tap on a photo in the gallery below to see it in full.
The November 6-9 retreat at Providence Point Retreat and Conference Centre near Lanark was enjoyed by all. The food was great. We all worked on projects that we brought. We shared techniques with one another. Played a game of BINGO each night and enjoyed the camaraderie of fellow Quilters. I think I can truly say we all had a great time! -- Joanna Vlaming Click or tap an image in the gallery below to see it in full. |
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