March 2019 Meeting Highlights

What a lot of activity at this meeting!
Our annual challenges were due and the quilts in all 4 of the challenges were displayed in preparation for the "viewer's choice" voting for the prize winners.

Refer to the 2019 Challenges blog post for photos and results of the challenges.

Guest Speaker - Gary Devries

Gary Devries joined us to share his talents and passion with Quilt Inspired Wood Designs. Gary has been working as a cabinet-maker for 45 years.  He began his career in London Ontario where he did his apprenticeship. In 1979 he moved to the Valley and was joint owner of Gary and Ron's Cabinet-Making.  Since 2000 he has been working from home in a small business known as Gary's Wood  Designs. He has enjoyed working with wood since early in his teens.  He has made many interesting things from tables, beds, and cupboards to urns for ashes, gigantic chairs and event props.   

Gary began his story by showing his fabric creations and sharing his entertaining stories about those projects. His first was a self taught, secretly made bed quilt to surprise his wife Mary, a long time quilter and very active member of our guild, as an anniversary gift.

Then Gary turned his attention and talents to his primary interest in working with wood to combine that with quilting. This is a very unique niche and his work is exacting and spectacular. He used familiar quilting terminology, including "on point" and "flying geese" in his descriptions of his work.

Gary uses many different colours and types of wood, mostly hardwood, including cherry, maple, ash, poplar, rosewood, walnut, ebony and teak. He reserves the most expensive woods for small accent pieces and he told us that quilting fabric is a bargain in comparison. 
If he's driving down a road and sees a pallet from a foreign country, he's thinking about the exotic wood the pallet is constructed of. He's also been known to go "dumpster diving" for wood!

Gary gets ideas  for his designs from quilting magazines and from architecture. He builds from the inside out and does not plan out his full pattern ahead of time.
Exacting carpentry skills and knowledge of geometry are required. Cuts are often made on an angle, for example to cut an oval from a circular piece of wood.

One of the many challenges in this work is clamping to ensure that he can glue the tiny pieces without them sliding all over the place. Gary uses a water based glue followed by a beeswax treatment, or heated vegetable oil.
He also has to consider the placement of adjacent pieces of wood due to properties of specific types of wood such as colour bleeding and changes in colour over time.
Because wood cleans itself these are ideal for use with food.

Smaller pieces of wood can be used for coasters and the smallest pieces in jewelry.

Draws
​Our meeting wrapped up with our draws and some very happy winners!

Block of the month: Joyce Trafford
Guess the number of pages in the library book:  Paulette McCarron
50-50 draw:  Paulette McCarron
Gift Basket: Nicky Barham
Door Prizes: Geraldine Lynn, Donna Curtis, Suzanne deJoode, Anne Cruickshank, Margaret Fisher, Karen Maheral, Barb Devries, Nicky Barham, Katrina Kahn, Joyce Murray