40th Anniversary challenge for the LFQG

 This year was the 40th anniversary of the London Friendship Quilt Guild and of course, due to covid, none of the usual celebrations could take place.  However, this does not stop a bunch of quilters from having fun! 😁

The guild put out a round robin challenge, but we would be making our own quilts.  The first task was to make a center block and put 40 on there somewhere.  I dug through my stash and found a couple of charm packs of Mama Sews fabrics as well as the leftovers of a scrap bag I bought and some miscellaneous yardage from the same line.  It had a sewing theme which was appropriate for a guild challenge.  I also found solid red and black and grey in the stash that could be used.

Each month, we met on zoom, showed our progress and drew the next border instruction.   The borders were:  houses, flowers, diamonds, four patches, paper piecing and rail fence.  There were some real challenges along the way, but I combined the diamond with the flower border (making the corner stones diamonds) and used the paper piecing for corner stones on the four patch blocks.  My original idea was to use the rail fence block to make a picket fence, but it just would not work colour wise.  You just have to listen to what these quilts tell you!

I did some extensive quilting on it and had fun with it.  And, we really got to know some of the members of the LFQG.  At the regular meetings, the group is so large and we tend to sit in the same spots and there are a lot of faces, but zoom has really helped us to connect with other members during this challenging time.  Quilters know how to take lemons and make lemonade.  My thanks to the program committee and board of the LFQG for all the wonderful ways we were able to stay connected this year.  Here's to the next 40 years for the guild. (Click on the photos to enlarge the picture.)

The finished quilt

The center block is from an embroidery pattern by Shelly Burge for Country Cabin Craft Patterns.  I added beads spelling forty on the sewing machine.

The diamonds quilted in the corners continued the diamond theme in the next row

These fun watering can blocks are from a wonderful book "The Paper-Pieced Home" by Penny Layman.  I resized the block to fit my borders.

Swirly quilting in the border

The back was pieced with bits and pieces of leftover charm squares, yardage and leftovers from my grandson's quilt backing.

The quilting from the back