PALS member Sue made two really cute baby charitable quilts using this pattern from Quiltalicious
HUG & MOOCH BABY QUILT 

On the first quilt she used only the X’s and added and extra row.

On the second quilt, she used the four O’s blocks and the scraps from the X’s to make a strip quilt!

If you want to make these two quilts you’ll need to add 1 1/2 yards of white to set the blocks.

Purchase your quilt kits here: Hugs & Mooches

At my quilt guild (PALS) meeting last night, a special award was given to three of the members for their donation of charitable baby quilts.  Karen, Jan and Brenda made 212 quilts between them.  This was a mother - daughter - aunt team who worked all year in competition with each other to see how many quilts they could make. Brenda worked especially hard and brought 80 quilts to our last meeting! Give these gals a great big hug!

THANK YOU! Your kindness is greatly appreciated!

Also, our quilt guild gives out a special pin to any member that makes two or more baby quilts during the year and this year we gave out 45 pins! We also have collected 342 quilts this year and these will be given out in March to different charitable organizations in our area.  Everyone who makes charitable quilts deserves a great big hug and a very grateful: Thank You!

Have you ever wanted to try making a rag quilt? 

I’m one of the 3 co-chairs (my two sister-in-laws are the others) for our quilt guild. We chair the “Baby Quilts” function of our quilt guild.   Members donate their unwanted baby fabrics & batting for the use in these baby quilts.  We also have free patterns they can use if they choose to make their own quilt.  Each quilt gets a very pretty label on the back:

All year long our quilt guild collects baby quilts to give out to our local charitable agencies.  Once a year we invite local charitable agencies to come to our quilt guild meeting and accept our quilts.

Last year we handed out at least 200 quilts, all made by the members of our guild, to 8 local charities. It’s very rewarding to see their faces as they take these quilts!

This year we had a ”quilt bee” at our meeting and “Baby Quilts” had volunteers cutting kits, labeling quilts, and sewing quilts. Our quilt guild is so big (150ish members)! It was fun to sit and talk with these helpful members.

Last month I introduced a new line of quilt patterns  from Quiltalicious for baby quilts.

The designer, Tammy Harrision, had been (im)patiently waiting to get them back from her quilter because photographs are better visuals than the image of a quilt pattern cover.  Here is her finished quilt isn’t it pretty?!

These patterns are available for sale here.  Kits are available here for your quilt guild or charity and the kit will include 6 @ 1/2 yards of fabric at a special price and are for BOYS & GIRLS with a FREE PATTERN.

A few years ago, I was on a bus trip with my SIL and her group of quilters, and we were traveling from Baton Rouge, LA to the Houston Quilt Show. The first billboard I saw on the Texas border was “Don’t mess with Texas!” OK OK I thought,  I’ll leave you alone! I did figure out that the sign really meant -don’t litter - but I’m from the North - and have watched lots of John Wayne movies so I wasn’t going to mess with Texas.

{queue the western music from Gunsmoke}

When my friend Tammy asked me if I wanted to donate a few gifts to her quilt group Christmas party, I said sure and sent them a few things. Well, I guessed I messed with Texas because I got this box in the mail from the Medina quilt group. I opened it to find it full of thank you gifts all representing Texas!

The yucca (Tammy informed me it was a aloe plant) which is native to Texas, survived the trip and is doing quite well!

There were really great cook books with wonderful recipes and other
things that represent Texas:

THANK YOU - Medina quilt group! This was so much fun to get all the creative gifts you sent.

I like messing with Texas!

Quilt Guilds - Do you belong to one?

 In today’s blog I was going to talk about belonging to Quilt Guilds and how much fun that is. But, I thought I’d tell you about last nights meeting. It started out pretty normal in our structured kind of way:

Secretary read last months minutes….

Treasurer reported our balances…..

Membership (wow 108 people here tonight)….

 Hospitality (new this year “round robin quilt”)….

 Newsletter…..

Baby Quilts…. it was my turn! “What! - I’m suppose to talk tonight!?” - eek - I grabbed my sign in sheet ran up there and said this: ” We received 18 baby quilts tonight - thank you - and please stop back and see how beautiful they are” and ran off the stage, whew! - got though that! I don’t like being unprepared so I’ll usually spend all day thinking about what I’m going to say.

 All was going well. The co-chairs were introducing all the new board members. We were to come up on the stage and show two quilts we made. When it was my turn, I showed my wall hanging and Melissa’s matching placemats.

 As I was coming down the stairs someone from the audience who was on her cell phone said “There’s a tornado warning for our county”. Oh my! - we don’t get tornadoes - ever! Everyone just sat there - we were all stunned.

 My cell phone was in the truck, I ran out in the pouring blowing rain to get it so I could call my weather - watching kids. All the lines were busy! In the meantime, our group moved out into the hall. I finally reached my husband who said it was just computer generated “dolper” rotation and no tornado was spotted. Back to the meeting.

 Time for a break! We always have something good to eat and drink and this month’s hosts made apple crisp and veggie pizza. yum! yum! About 15 minutes later my daughter called and said there was another line of storms coming.  I asked her to call me if we got another warning.

 In the meantime my co-chair (SIL Diane) and I packed up all the new baby quilts we received so we could to get them to the car before it started storming again.  We headed home to relax.

Nothing materialized out of the last bunch of storms (we say the lake “ate the storm” - Lake Michigan)

 Here’s a daytime picture of what our storms often look like.  I took this picture last summer.  The storm was just wind and rain because the lake “ate it”.