Work is underway on the guild’s quilt for the QuiltCon 2018 Charity Quilt Challenge. The theme this year is “Modern Traditionalism” and, once again, we’ve chosen to incorporate it in a way that reflects our Silicon Valley location. After choosing a pattern, we shopped our members’ fabric stashes and supplemented with purchased fabric that we then pre-cut and sorted into block kits.

Piecing is underway! We’re looking forward to seeing all of the finished blocks and assembling the finished quilt in October.

We’ve wrapped our third annual quilt retreat and what can we say, it was a great success! This year we filled the extra long weekend (two extra optional days!) with lots of sewing, crafty projects, and relaxation.

We had a lot of opportunities to sew for charity at this year’s retreat. There was a whole wall in the workroom designated to making blocks for three separate quilt projects. By the end of the retreat we had a full quilt top of one quilt and all the blocks made for the two other quilts. In addition to that, our members whipped out binding and pieced backings for the quilts as well. It was a team effort by all our members!

We also had a fun craft project planned to get members up and out of their seats — barn quilts! We saw the idea all over Instagram and knew it’d be a great idea to take over some of the outdoor space at Hidden Valley outside the sew room. The guild purchased the wood boards and members (special shout out to our member Eileen!!) brought in paints, brushes, and tape to share. We picked out our favorite blocks and got to work. The final products were truly awesome!

By popular demand, we splurged this year and brought in a couple masseuses to give chair massages on Saturday afternoon and evening for some extra pampering. Members booked 30 minute time slots throughout the day to take a break from sewing and relax outside in nature. A special thank you goes out to Central Coast Massage for coming out to our venue and spoiling us for the afternoon. 

To keep the merriment going throughout the weekend, we decided to do crafty BINGO. The bingo board was filled with crafty objects we called out over the weekend — as well as fun action items members could cross out on their own if they completed on their own time. These action items encouraged members to pitch in, get to know each other, and have a little fun. Congrats to Bev on winning our craft BINGO prize!

Thanks to Jan for coordinating the retreat, Rochelle for creating the fun goody bags for members and booking the masseuses, and all our members for making it such a fun weekend!

Until next year…

“Ethnic quilts, broadly defined as quilts produced by people outside of the American quilting mainstream, such as Native Americans or the Amish, or quilts inspired by non-Western art of any kind, have always fascinated me.  I’ve made quilts inspired by cloth, carvings, paintings or petroglyphs made by diverse groups of people from the Andes, the Congo, the Kalahari desert, the Australian outback and many other places.  I hope that the rich world of non-Western art will also inspire you on your quilting journey.”

– Pam Rocco

We were so thrilled to have the brilliant Pam Rocco come speak at our last meeting and share dozens of her amazing quilts with us. We loved hearing about where she gets her inspiration from, her process on coming up with her designs and all the facets of her life that have played a role in her quilt making journey. One of the interesting details she shared with us was her use of non-traditional fabrics, including draperies and clothing.

We’re incredibly proud to present our 2017 QuiltCon Charity Quilt which hung at QuiltCon East quilt show in Savannah, Georgia the last week in February.

Here’s two of our member’s who attended QuiltCon showing off our lovely quilt!

Our team had a lot of ideas for incorporating the theme of “scale” in our quilt. We quickly decided to use scale to represent a data set. We also knew that we wanted to do something that represented the high-tech industry that dominates the area where our guild is located.

Being a group of women in Silicon Valley, we discussed multiple topics around women in the high-tech industry, from representation in industry leadership and management to pay disparity. Ultimately we chose to represent the disparity of women vs men in technical roles at major Silicon Valley companies.

We were excited to incorporate a theme that reflects our concerns as women, our environment as members of the Silicon Valley community, and our passion as quilters.

A group of us met to discuss the theme and how to implement it into blocks that could be worked on individually and then assembled into a finished quilt. We chose colors from the selection provided by MQG, and decided on 10” blocks because the math for color percentage would be simpler. We distributed fabric bundles and the following rules rules for the individual quilt blocks:

• 10” finished square
• Use only right angles (rectilinear); No curved or angled piecing
• Use of color groups in the specified ratios (can be applied across multiple blocks):
  • 84%: Green, Blue, and/or Dark Blue fabric
  • 16%: Gray, Pink, and/or Yellow fabric (16 sq. inches)

Around a dozen members volunteered to make blocks, and we collected more than the 63 needed for our design. A smaller group gathered for a sew day to lay out and assemble the finished quilt top; we decided to place pieces with larger color blocks at the top and blocks with smaller pieces at the bottom, creating a feeling of weight at the bottom of the quilt. We handed off to a member for quilting and to another member for binding and attaching the label and sleeve. It was a true team effort.

Our theme is represented through the use of lighter value fabrics (yellow, pink, gray) representing the percentage of technical roles occupied by women (16% of the overall quilt top) and the darker value fabrics (blue, green, navy) representing the percentage of technical roles occupied by men (84%).*

We believe the quilt illustrates the imbalance in the percentage of women vs men in these key roles in this industry.

[SVMQG would like to thank Fat Quarter Shop and Hart’s Fabrics for providing discounted fabric for this project.]

*Data source: CNET “Women in tech: The numbers don’t add up”, May 2015

Want to know more about the challenge put on by the MQG? Check out the original challenge information here: http://www.quiltconeast.com/quilt-show/quiltcon-charity-quilt-challenge/

Thanks to all who came out in the ghastly weather for February’s guild meeting. We had a great time talking about more of our plans for 2017 as a guild, sharing our monthly UFO finishes, collecting a handful of cool toned color blocks to be made into a charity quilt and even carving out some crafty time to make some cute fabric necklaces!

This was also our first meeting at the Milpitas Police Station and we’re calling it a success! The venue was spacious and even featured a design wall!! 😉  You can catch us there again next month for our meeting on Thursday, March 9 at 7:00pm.

Show and Tell and a continuation of our UFO Program:

Charity Blocks:

You’ll have to forgive our slightly crumpled blocks for January’s “cool toned colored” quilt block challenge. They traveled from their member’s homes through the downpour of rain to be at our meeting tonight. (Aren’t they awesome? 🙌🏼 ) Thanks to all who made it out to our meeting in this crazy rain! Can’t wait to continue collecting blocks to turn into quilts for charity.

Members: If you’d like to contribute a block, you’re still welcome to! We’ll be collecting blocks throughout the year for various quilts that will be sewn together on special Charity Sew Days (dates TBD) and handed off to our charity. The challenge was just to make a quilt block with cool toned colors and which will finish to 10″ when sewn into a quilt (10.5″ when you drop it off with us).

Here we are again! January 1 brings in the start of 2017 and it another fun year at the guild.

We are very excited to present the new Board Members of the 2017 Year as follows:

Rochelle Rosales, President
Amy Crawford, Co-Vice President
Sarah Osentowski, Co-Vice President
Lisbeth Polavarapu, Treasurer
Diana Lubliner, Secretary
Beverly Thompson, Membership Coordinator
Heidi Mackessy, Education coordinator
Amanda Morris, Sew Day Coordinator
Tricialyn Apolinar, Swap + Challenge Coordinator
Sarah Osentowski, Philanthropy
Jan Strockis, Retreat
Amy Crawford + Sarah Osentowski, Media + Web Chair
Renee Silva, QuiltCon (2017-2018) Charity Quilt Chair

As you can see, this year we introduced many positions in the guild to help spread the work around. It takes a village after all! Thank you to all our members who volunteered to help make this upcoming year a stellar one.

We’ve already held our first board member meeting and have some great ideas on making the planning of this upcoming year a great one! Excited to share with all of you our ideas. See you at an upcoming meeting soon!