Our "Spirit of Gees Bend" Challenge results

On Friday, six of the seven ladies that accepted Susan's Challenge to make a small quilt in the spirit of the Gees Bend Quilts, met for lunch after attending the London Friendship Quilt Guild show together. Unfortunately, Susan wasn't able to join us, so we hope to meet again soon to see what Susan came up with. We also invited Christine to join us for lunch. We ordered our meals first and while we waited for them to arrive, we took over the restaurant and had a blast seeing everyone's little quilts. Isn't it funny how you'd never dare to take out a quilt, stand up and show it off in a public spot, but when there are seven ladies, we don't even notice the people around us and yak up a storm and have a great time, totally oblivious to the reactions of people around us :-)! I clued in when I was madly taking pictures, trying not to get the glare of the windows to throw off my photo, and I see the puzzled looks of several ladies sitting at a nearby table. I'm not sure if they were quilters or not, but I really wondered what they were thinking of these totally non traditional quilts :-)! Maybe they thought we were showing off our first projects since we didn't get them quite straight LOL.

Susan drafted the guidelines for our challenge. We could only use a pair of scissors, strong thread, thimble and, if we wanted to use a sewing machine, it had to be a straight stitch machine only. We were also not allowed to buy anything for this project, so it was 'make do'.

Here is Amy with her little quilt made from scraps of clothing she sewed long ago for her four girls. She pieced and quilted it on a straight stitch machine and stitched the binding by hand.

Christine in the background admiring Amy's quilt

This is me (Jacqui) with my Housetop design. My favourite quilts at the Gees Bend show were these housetop patterns. My daughter went to Jamaica on a Mission trip when she was 15 and she brought this bright fabric home for me. Since it was a rayonny type fabric, I figured it would be perfect. Wow, cutting this with scissors was like nailing jello to a tree LOL! The black is a sports cotton. I pieced and quilted it on my Singer 15-88 treadle and did the quilting in the floral sections by hand.

I had enough of the floral for backing so I used it all up!


Here is Jackie's project. I'm not sure if she did it by machine or by hand, but I will update that info later:

Nice job Jackie!!

Lynn did a bars and blocks variation using a 1940's tablecloth with other fabrics she had in her stash.

She even pieced the back adding to the charm:

Yellie is holding up her project while Gail tries to get that perfect shot :-)


Very cute Yellie. Not sure if this is done by machine or by hand either. More info to follow.


Gail made hers out of denims and corduroys. She and her daughter are both short and always need to hem up pants. These are the cut offs. She did it all by hand! Quilting that must have been a real challenge :-).


A closer view of the little wallhanging. You can check out more photos of this get together on Gail's blog.

Quilts of Gees Bend

On Thursday, 7 of us met at the London Convention Center for a quilt show put on by Cotton by Post about the Quilts of Gees Bend. This was a very different show from the usual Quilt show that we attend. We all attended the lecture in the afternoon which explained the history and context. We thoroughly enjoyed the show and lecture and have decided to do a small challenge project "in the spirit of Gees Bend". We hope to meet at the end of October to unveil our finished projects. Check back to the blog around that time to see what we all come up with :-). Here is the whole group that attended the show:

Lynn, Yellie, Jackie, Amy, Jacqui (me), Susan and Gail:

Some of the quilts on display at the show:

Gail and Amy:

I really liked this one's use of colour: