Ocean Current

I belong to a charity bee on Flickr called do. Good Stitches. It's a wonderful (and huge) group of quilters that makes quilts for various charities. We are split up into circles of 10 to make things more manageable. My circle, Believe, makes quilts for foster kids that we send to My Very Own Blanket in Ohio. I love this cause!

Each group has stitchers who sew 2 blocks per month, and quilters who put those blocks together and do the actual quilting. I was a quilter for awhile and this is one of the quilts I made. The quilter also gets to pick out the design and color palette so of course I went with blues! My stash is overflowing with blues.

I wasn't sure exactly how I was going to put the blocks together but I knew the half square triangles would give me a lot to work with. I put them on the design wall and just kept moving them around until I had a few layouts I liked. In the end, I really love how this one came together.

The quilting was a lot of fun on this one! I wanted it to be dense to withstand a lot of washing and I wanted to have some fun with free motion quilting. I decided on thin figure 8s for the blue lines and a boxy stipple in the white lines. I was able to get the whole thing done on my Juki in just a few hours! Oh how I love my Juki!

As I was finishing this one up, a terrible landslide tragedy struck very close to home. The Oso landslide killed 43 people and buried 49 homes in Oso, Washington all in a matter of seconds. It took weeks to find all of the victims as the mud and debris were over 100 ft deep in some places. My dad's house is just 10 miles away from this on that same road so it was pretty scary for me. I talked to my Believe circle and they agreed to let me send this quilt to the Oso victims and first responders instead. I hope it's bringing comfort and joy to whomever has it now!

Allison

PS - since it's the beginning of the month, it's goal time! I'm going to finish my Oakshott Autumn quilt this month. Promise!