Several interesting events in June worth checking out!

June 4-5
Come check out the quilt bombing on the Iron Horse Trail in Danville. Hosted by Wooden Gate Quilts, quilts will be hung on the fence of the Iron Horse Trail that runs near the shop. The viewing area is between Prospect Ave. and Linda Mesa from 9:30-5:30, weather permitting.

June 18-19
KPFA Summer Crafts Fair
Craneway Pavilion, Richmond
This is a free arts and crafts fair with a “Quilts and Quilters” Exhibit and Sale.

What are we up to?

Two of our members, Darci and Amelia, are working on a sister sewing group that focuses on garment sewing. I have to say, we love seeing the garments our members made at our quilt meetings! However, if you want a more focused garment group, contact us and we will put you in touch with the new East Bay Stitchers group!

Many of us are interested in a Bay Area – wide modern quilters meet up! Stay tuned for more details for a possible Fall meet up at the de Young. Which incidentally, will coincide with an exciting upcoming exhibit, On The Grid: Textiles and Minimalism.

As always, Show and Tell was a real treat and super inspiring. I didn’t end up taking any pictures (low phone battery, dang it) but you can always check out our Flickr page, the Instagram hashtag #ebmq, or come to our next meeting on June 28th from 6:30-8:30pm at A Verb For Keeping Warm!

It was fun having Mia Pond from the Oakland Museum of California come out to meet with us at the meeting in November.  She came to share information about the Yo-Yo’s and Half Squares show at the museum. It’s a really fun show built around the collection of Eli Leon, a Bay Area quilt collector, curator, and author.  Check it out while you still can!  (It closes on February 21.)

Mia was also there to feature the East Bay Modern Quilters in the OMCA’s Local Maker feature.  It was really wonderful to hear fellow East Bay Modern members share why quilting and our group in particular are so meaningful to them.

What a busy night we had! Glad so many were able to make it.

Events around town…

We couldn’t be happier with the imminent book release from our host, Kristine Vejar at A Verb For Keeping Warm. Please join the store in celebrating her book, The Modern Natural Dyer, and their 5th anniversary in the San Pablo location on Saturday October 24th, 4-8pm. Lots of fun is being planned and I hope to see you there.

We are also excited to learn that several of our members will be showing their works in the show, Strata. This quilt art exhibit by Studio Art Quilt Associates (SAQA) will be held at the Harrington Art Gallery in Pleasanton from November 12 – December 16, 2015 with the opening reception on Thursday, November 12, 7-9pm. Please come join us in supporting our local quilt artists!

Lastly, don’t forget to check out quilts from Eli Leon’s collection, Yo-Yo’s and Half Squares: Contemporary California Quilts, at the Oakland Museum of California this September 12, 2015 – February 21, 2016. A fantastic glimpse in the art and lives of 5 quilt makers, Angie Tobias, Arbie Williams, Mattie Pickett, Rosie Lee Thompson, and Sherry Byrd should not be missed.

In group news…

Many members expressed frustration with our google group and requested another option for sharing news within our group. We opted to give Facebook a try. Not to be confused with our open community organization page, this is a closed group requiring approval to join. Hopefully to be easier to navigate and use, this is a place where members can discuss group news and quilting without the general population involvement. Please contact us if you would like to join.

Pati is already hard at work planning quilt retreats at Walker Ranch for 2016! A beautiful location with lots of space, reasonably priced with room and board included. What more can you ask for? Tentative dates are scheduled for January and November, 2016. Please contact us if you want more information.

Chancy is currently organizing sew in nights at Sue Fox’s studio for this fall. Usually held on a Friday or Saturday night, for 10$ you can stitch ‘n bitch with the rest of us! More information to be posted on our FB group as details are finalized.

A really wonderful  show and tell tonight with historic family quilts, lots of newly finished quilts and many works in progress!

C&T Publishing are having a sale! For this weekend only, they are having their online Summer Sizzler Blowout Sale. Then for those in the area, on Sept. 7th they are having their annual warehouse sale. It’s a great deal, so make sure you check it out.

The date for the retreat has been finalized for the weekend of Oct. 25! If you are a member of EBMQG and would like to go, please leave a comment on our google group under the thread RETREAT. Don’t have access to the google group and you’re a member? Leave a comment here and we will followup with you!

The Modern Quilt Guild is now open for individual membership!

A new quilt store is now open in Novato! Quilt Elegance is located in the beautiful Bel Marin Keys, but they have an online shop for those out of the area. They are able to carry high quality quilting cottons at $7.99/ yd! They carry all sorts of things to finish your projects and classes are available as well. Please support a local business and check them out!

One of our members, Pati, is now a contributor to the wonderful blog, See How We Sew. Her first blog contribution is a fascinating look in her block experiment. My favorite is the Jack’s Delight block in round 3!

Patterns Gone Digital came highly recommended for those of you thinking of getting into the pattern business.

Stitch Modern is just around the corner and we need to get planning! For those that want to participate in the process, please let us know. We will need people to finalize and organize events. Some ideas that were brought up:

1. Publishing a book and authors forum.
2. Selling on Etsy/ quilting as a business forum.
3. Include local fabric stores with a shop hop.
4. Kid day events.
5. Do demos.

Hi there! We know it’s been awhile, but we’ve continued to meet on the last Tuesday of the month in our new location at A Verb For Keeping Warm! Here are the highlights of our July meeting.

Stacey has once again offered her cabin up for a quilting retreat this Fall. Current available weekend dates are: Sept 14 and 24, Oct 5 and 19th. The cabin can accommodate about 8 sewists. If you are a member of EBMQG and want to join, please let her know by either leaving a comment here or on the google group thread on which dates are good for you. She will schedule a weekend that hopefully accommodates the most people.

Our third annual quilt show, Stitch Modern, takes place in February. Birgit is in the process of finalizing the dates with the Piedmont Center of the Arts. Please think about what you would like to enter! Anyone who has attended at least two meetings is eligible to enter a quilt. Please note that we don’t meet in December and typically set up the show during our January meeting. We will likely have requests for submissions in October/ November. Please stay tuned!

Piedmont Center for the Arts is holding another quilt show, Interpreted Inspiration, the weekend of August 16-18th. They also have a call for artist submissions for the upcoming juried show, Return to Simplicity. We would love to see a quilt in the show! Deadline for submission is September 2nd!

Tara has a quilt pattern scheduled to be published in the Interweave magazine. She is also working with someone to publish another quilt pattern to sell. Congrats!

East Bay Heritage Quilters continues to welcome us to their modern meet ups!

Margaret holds onto our EBMQG library, please let her know if you’d like to borrow a book.

Lots of recommendations for Leah Day’s website for help with free motion quilting. Also check out her blog, The Free Motion Quilting Project.

Empty Spools Seminars also came highly recommended!

We look forward to seeing you at our next meeting on August 27th!

 

Right now I’m SORELY missing our ex-pat, Lauren, not just because she’s such a great East Bay Modern member, but because she was EXTRA great at writing up the meeting wrap-up blog posts! (I hope you’re having tons of fun over in Japan, Lauren! We miss you!) Enough crying into my keyboard, though. We have quilting to talk about!

Last month we said goodbye, both to Lauren, and also to our meeting location for the past few years, New Pieces in Berkeley. We will all miss Sharona’s wonderful hospitality and thank her so much for putting up with us! Without her and the shop, I’m not sure where this group would be, but I suspect that we would be crammed into the corner of a dirty coffee shop, if anywhere!

This month, we moved over to Oakland to a new kid on the quilt shop block, A Verb for Keeping Warm. Kristine, the owner has stocked her lovely store with all sorts of gorgeous yarns and fabrics to tempt us as we sit and chat.  Since we didn’t have any “guild business” to focus on this month(if you like that kind of stuff, refer to our last few months of meeting notes to get your fill!), we had lots of time for everyone’s favorite, show and tell! I won’t go into detail, but here are a few of the things we touched on during the evening:

• Dan’s teaching at Camp Stitchalot this summer!
• Joel’s quilt exhibition at EBHQ.
• Carol’s silk tour in Japan (fascinatingly weird little worms!).
• Claire’s doing tutorials at the East Bay Heritage’s Modern Meet Up.
• Kristine showed us work based on Alabama Channin techniques. She’s also teaching an indigo dye class soon!
• Carol told us about her trip to Surtex.
• Kim is doing an amazing job in the REPEAT(ed) challenge on The Printed Bolt.
• Claudia told us about Roxanne’s Glue Baste.
• Tara assures us that quilting with metallic threads can be done.
• Stacey’s excited about the Rabari applique and embroidery class taught by Lachuben Rabari.

You can see lots of eye-candy over on Flickr, but it’s never as fun as coming to a meeting, hearing about the work, and meeting some great people, so if you’re in the area,  come to the next meeting. We’d love to meet you!

Spring is here and can you believe how quickly winter went??!! This was our first meeting since November (technically we had a January meeting, but we used it hanging Stitch Modern) and we had a lot to go over.

First off…

STITCH MODERN WAS A SUCCESS!!! We had a really good showing at our second annual quilt show. Stacey wrote up a good review in another post which you can check out here. Thanks to everyone for their hard work!! Now, time to start planning for next year;)

If you missed the talk at A Verb for Keeping Warm about Rabari Applique or you were there and want to learn more, Kristine Vejar is having a class at her shop on March 24. For more information check out this link.

Tony Fisher, the marketing and community relations person at Healdsburg Senior Living, has invited our guild to participate in a quilt show. Last year’s show was a big success and they are expecting a bigger turn out this year. The show will be Saturday April 13 from 9 am to 4 pm at Healdsburg Senior Living. They would like 6-10 (depending on size) quilts that would hang from lines (so no hanging sleeve required). There will be prize money involved. Please think about if you are interested in hanging a quilt in this show and if you are available to volunteer that day. Here is a link to last years show.

QuiltCon was awesome!!! Several of our guild members attended and had a great time…maybe too good a time?! Three of members had quilts hanging, Joel Ignacio’s “Decoded Paragraph”, Dan Rouse’s “Hurle Burle Marx”, andf “Terri Carpenter’s Flock of Starlings”. Not only did Terri get in, but she won!!!! She placed first in Piecing, Small Category. Good job everyone!!!! (If you want to see the all the winning quilts check out  here and here) If you missed the fun you can watch the lectures for free on Craftsy!!

Speaking of awesome and talented guild members, our own Kim Anderson is a finalist in Repeat(Ed) on The Printed Bolt. She will be competing in a series of challenges with fabric design. Great Job and we look forward to seeing your creations, Kim!!!

We have a block challenge for our guild members. This was not discussed at the meeting because we ran out of time and didn’t create it until most everyone left…oops! It started when we got a bundle of super cute fabric, but didn’t have enough for everyone. Our solution is as follows:

1. Create a 12″ block that describes you. This may be simple piecing, paper piecing, applique…whatever. We just want a block that expresses who you are.

2. Quilt the block as you see fit. This means it must have three layers and can be tied, hand quilted, or quilted by machine…what ever fits you best.

3. Bind the quilted block as you see fit. We are open to creativity on this. You can do a traditional binding or a zig zag/serging stitch.

4. Bring the block to the March EBMQG meeting to share and be entered in a drawing for a fat quarter bundle! It is just that easy!!

Feel free to post your block progress in our Flickr and check out this link for more information.

This weekend is the San Fransisco Quilter Guild show Evolution of an Art Form in which we will have a special exhibit. The show is Saturday, March 9 from 10:00 – 5:00 and Sunday, March 10 10:00 – 4:00 at the Concourse Exhibition Center 635 – 8th Street, San Francisco.

You do not need to volunteer to have a quilt hanging, but any help would be really appreciated. Set up will be Friday at 11. We will be hanging out show. We need volunteers during the show to answer question and hang out by our quilts. We would take everything down on Sunday at 4. There are more details in our Google group.

If you want to have a quilt in the show please register it here. We need to know how much room we need so please do this ASAP!!! Also, make sure that your quilt will have transportation to the show and a hanging rod.

For more information please join check out our Google group.