I won!!!

One of the guilds I belong to, the Miami Co. Quilters' Guild, hosted our annual Drag 'N Brag show this past weekend, and I won 2nd in machine quilting for my "Put a Hex on You" quilt! I found out Saturday night and practically jigged with excitement over the news. Our guild has at least 8 long arm quilters and several have been quilting professionally for many years--and are darn good! So getting this award REALLY means so much for me.

I think winning with this particular quilt is also exciting--this is the one that I used a free Moda Fabric pattern called "Hexie Shuffle" and modified it to allow for lots of that "negative space" on which to do some modern quilting. But darned if the silly thing didn't go together rather "catty wampus" and I ended up taking it apart and re-doing the negative space half. Once I got that done, I let the quilt top "rest" while I tried to figure out how to mark the hexies in the negative space. I was chicken to use a blue or purple marker, or even colored chalk for fear that it would leave a shadow on all that white. FINALLY I decided that I'd mark with white chalk and use the black light on the long arm to allow me to see it. I then quilted the basic outline of those big hexies and asked my husband to look at it--thankfully! He immediately spotted one that wasn't really a hexie--yikes! So I spent some time ripping--:( I finally got it done and was out of time to block it before putting it into the Kansas City Regional Quilt Fest in June--and it was definitely needing blocking! So for this show I took the time and got it blocked--and in the process mostly corrected the 2.5" different in the two edges. I'd used double Tuscany wool batting and not only did I get such wonderful texture and drape, but it made the blocking easy, too. So enjoy this quilt once again. Happy quilting!