Finished!

Bursting Star is finished and hung on the living room wall. This pattern was in the Nov/Dec issue of McCall's Quilting magazine. I made up the design in Electric Quilt with a lot of help from the EQ7 Yahoo group. Thank you, ladies! Such a generous group, I couldn't have managed without them. The original quilt had five different colors and I wanted to play around with other color combinations. I came up with this blue and white/light version.  

Oh, the horror! I did a test before I quilted my bursting star and thought the tension was really off. Well, after re-threading and changing the needle things still didn't look right so I decided to "look under the hood", so to speak. Ack! What a mess! I actually used my vacuum cleaner to clear this accumulation of lint out. The result: perfect stitch tension. 

Back Roads Quilters met for our annual Christmas party recently at a member's home. Isn't this a lovely home? We really appreciate Linda's hospitality and generosity. We had a delicious pot luck supper and then had our Yankee Swap. Chapter members who taught classes during 2014 were given special gifts. See the box on the floor in the center of the room? That is our brand new electric Accuquilt cutting machine. All of our templates from our old crank machine will fit this new one. 

After our Yankee Swap we had show & tell. Brenda showed the quilt she made at Camp Kieve this fall. Someone at the retreat suggested that she use her leftovers and she put together this lovely table runner, too. 

I think these half square triangle units were leftover from her flying geese units. She said she would have thrown them out normally, but followed up on the suggestion to sew them together. Brenda added the Merry Christmas strip on the sides that must have been part of the panel that she used in the quilt. So beautiful! 

Wonderful friends + beautiful quilts = joy, joy, joy!