Building our 2023 QuiltCon Community Quilt

What does it take to make an quilt for submission into the MQG QuiltCon Community Quilt Challenge? A lot of work and co-ordination across all members of the guild! This year's Challenge featured the theme of "Colour shift", and two colour schemes, one in pink and purples, and the one that the Calgary MQG selected - lime green to teal. Linda and Donna agreed to co-ordinate the efforts to take a block and a sketch to a fully rendered quilt.

First, guild member Melanie suggested her Improv Triangle Block, and a mock-up of how the final quilt could look was rendered by Karin. Several options for design and layout were considered at our August meeting, and this ended up being the selected design. Next up, how to interpret the shifting colours in fabric - there are over 16 million colours available in a computer, but only a few hundred in fabric.

Fabric was ordered, and Donna and Linda got together to cut and kit the fabric. We distributed them at the September meeting, and boy, did they ever disappear! Many thanks to everyone who sewed one or more of the blocks. Fortunately, they were an easy sew to return for our October meeting and retreat.

Look at all of the blocks! Fortunately, an end of October guild retreat was the perfect venue to continue working on the quilt. Blocks were sorted and trimmed.

The guild retreat was the also timely to get a few opinions on how the blocks should be laid out in the final version. Blocks were added to a design wall, moved, breaks taken, and block re-positioned until the perfect layout was achieved. Because many hands make light work, and there were 22 of us at the retreat, we took rows of blocks to sew until the entire top was constructed.

Next up, guild member Donna took the top home to longarm. She used rulers and a lot of thread changes to build up texture on our quilt. The longarmed top made an appearance at our November meeting.

Another one of our members, Heather, took the quilt home to square up, trim and bind.

and lastly, proper photos were submitted to the MQG for submission to QuiltCon. Phillipa took the photos and she had a little feline help while the quilt was hanging. Stay tuned for pictures from QuiltCon 2023 in Atlanta, where it will hang with the following description:

Calgary is far enough north that on rare nights we get to see aurora borealis - the northern lights. Eerie, ghostly lights in greens and teals shimmy across the sky - perhaps, as science would have it, the result of electromagnetic activity, or as the original peoples in our area would explain, the spirits of our ancestors dancing above. This phenomenon was the inspiration for the 2023 Calgary MQG Community Challenge Quilt. The Calgary MQG lives, works and quilts on traditional Treaty 7 territory.