Hello everyone! Just wanted to drop in and say I have missed everyone and I know you are all out there creating beautiful quilts, totes, ornaments, etc.

I took on some new adventures this year and haven't had a lot of extra time to keep up with the forums and I miss it very much.

Besides becoming a grief group facilitator earlier this year, in January I joined a beginning quilting club where the group was making a redwork quilt. Not my style of quilting at all, and I really dislike embroidery, but I was asked to join by a friend and did. I have met wonderful women who have become like family, but I still really dislike the quilt.

It truly has been the quilt from Hades. We finished all the pre-printed embroidery blocks only to discover they had been printed crooked onto the squares. The group turned them over to me as I had more tools than anyone else to try and fix it. It took me several days to figure out how to solve that issue and not destroy the embroidery. We finally had the entire quilt sandwiched and thread basted when we discovered the back had a big wrinkle that had gone undetected. We unbasted to start over and realized that the backing fabric purchased by the lady teaching the redwor had started to develop large runs. A new fabric had to be purchased. In other words, it was pretty much a quilt that if something could go wrong it did. I decided that it wasn't necessarily a bad thing as it gave all the beginners a chance to see how to detect and correct problems.

We had the quilt on a frame for months. I really don't know how women ever finished a quilt in the the days when that is the only way they had to make a quilt. We finally had to return the frame and are now finishing it off in hoops. I have it at home with me now and work on it in my off hours because we are down from 14 quilters to 5. We hope to be done by Sept. 1 to put it up for raffle.

One of the reasons we are down to 5 quilters is because something keeps happening to the women in our group. One lady had a heart attack, one broke her arm requiring surgery and she still may require further surgeries, and the list goes on and on. It almost got to the point that I thought we might need to burn the quilt to protect the rest of us.

In my personal quilting world my poppy quilt is close to completion. I decided to completely hand quilt it and I can't wait to see how it looks once it is washed. I did a few things different on this one.

I have also been making a lot of tissue holders. They make great little quick gifts when you just want to let someone know you have been thinking of them.

Keep on creating and learning. Every single person on this forum is special. I will be to spend more time reading about everyone's quilting adventures once this redwork quilt is completed.

Hugs,
Tortugaquilter (Cheryl)