Tale of a Group Project

Earlier this year my guild, Inland Northwest Modern Quilt Guild which I'm VP Programs of (in full disclosure), decided to make a quilt to raffle off.  It's been quite the adventure and at our first ever retreat we put the last stitch in the binding!

Bananas for Ananas

When we first decided to make a raffle quilt I stepped forward to design it.  I wanted a design that was modern traditional to appeal to as many quilters as possible and a design that the average quilter wouldn't be likely to complete on their own so I picked a pineapple log cabin.  The next step was to select a color palette.  We gave our guild several Design Seeds pictures to vote on and the winning picture was a great blue-green-purple palette.

With the color palette in hand I set out to design the quilt.  I spent several hours looking at pineapple quilts on Pinterest and instantly fell in love with all I saw.  I ended up designing a block with an ombre´, always a crowd-pleaser, and a good balance of negative space.

Once the design was completed the logistics of making a quilt was tackled.  Paper piecing was the only way to ensure each block would be uniform and precise.  Thankfully the guild found a great paper piecing template from Gigi Thimbles and secured the permission of the designer to use them in our raffle quilt.  Many of our members had never paper pieced before so one of our board members, Jane (@janequiltsslowly), lead a tutorial on paper piecing at a guild sew day.

Block making commenced and each guild member made a minimum of two blocks.  I, and many of the guild leadership, made block upon block upon block of pineapple log cabins to fill in the missing blocks.  Even the negative space is pieced!

It was so easy to assemble the quilt top because the blocks were paper pieced and because of that I think our next raffle quilt will be paper pieced as well.  After the top was ready it was taken to a INMod sew day where we we all helped remove the paper from the back.

Our VP Communications, Gretchen (@greencookiequilts) volunteered to quilt the project and after completing the quilting I worked on the binding with help form our President and another board member.  HURRAY FINISHED!

I'm so proud of everyone that worked on this project and helped us make such an amazing quilt.  Raffle tickets go on sale next week so if anyone is interested in purchasing a ticket, or two or twenty for  $1 each please contact me and I can make the arrangements.  The drawing is in March 2018 and we are hoping to sell out all 5000 tickets.  Our guild is only two years old and want to use the money to invite a modern quilter to do a workshop in the Spokane metro area and to continue our mission of educating the community about modern quilting.

In conclusion this was the best group project I've ever been part of and I have to give a large part of the credit to Haven our president and of course the paper pieced blocks.  Oh, in case you are wondering about the name Bananas for Ananas, ananas is pineapple in almost every language but English and we were all a little "cuckoo for Cocoa Puffs" by the end.

"The Lord is my strength and my defense; He has become my salvation.  He is my God, and I will praise Him, my father’s God, and I will exalt Him." Exodus 15:2