Sewing marathon

I've finally recovered from BA Modern Quilt Guild's Charity Sew Day, and I mean that in a good way.  Who knew putting on one of these events could be so exhausting!  And it was pretty low-key, at that.  It must have been all the prep leading up to it that did me in.   That, or the ten hours sitting on my posterior sewing like a fiend.

A cheerful and productive group showed up, churning out a plethora of quilt blocks, cat beds and quilt tops.  We started off with a fun Art Gallery Fabric challenge.  Jen and I had prepared a stack of 5" pre-pieced blocks and 5" charms from Art Gallery Fabric scraps and bolt ends.  After a quick tutorial on this NinePatch Remix block, a variation of a disappearing nine patch, our fearless sewers hit the ground running.

After about an hour, we had enough challenge blocks to piece our first quilt top:

The top is sashed with Pure Elements in Ash.  Because we deviated a little tutorial, our blocks came out to 13.5" (or thereabouts) rather than 9.5".

The challenge was a hit, with enough blocks pieced for 5 quilt tops.  We managed to piece a second top by day's end, and will finish piecing the remaining 3 quilt tops before the next guild meeting.  Below is quilt top #2, with Jen's hand attempting to cover my sashing mistake (a seam faces front on the left side):

The final tally at the end of the evening was 94 blocks, 11 cat beds and a total of 6 finished quilt tops.  I wrote a post about the event, which you can read about in the next day or so at the BA Modern Quilt Guild blog.