2024! Our 10th Year!

In celebration of our 10th anniversary the guild are hosting a public exhibition of our work.

Be prepared for beautiful quilts, delightful cake and the opportunity to own the handiwork of the clever guild members.

The exhibition will be launched by our founder Jo Avery and a talk on the first 10 years of the EMQG. 

Details can be found in the flyer below….

 Christmas in March!

For this month only i'm handing over the blog (mostly) to Mags Scammell. She is the host of tonight's ceremony and my co-conspirator in MAGHAG productions. These planning for these awards began in October but had to be postponed when COVID got in the way again. After transferring 10 awards across town and hiding them in a cupboard they were miraculously still in one piece!

So over to you Mags.......

So tonight we are hosting a special award ceremony. America has the Oscars, the UK has the BAFTAs, but tonight i welcome you to the CRAFTAs. During the awards please feel free to go to the bar, heckle and of course go to the loo. I will endeavour to do a group selfie, a la Ellen DeGeneres and to offend as many people as possible, as per Ricky Gervais, but i cannot promise to be as funny as either of them. (most of these were made by me, mainly because SOMEONE managed to pull the arm off the first one and then gave herself third degree burns with a glue gun)

AWARD FOR WINNER WHO WON'T TAKE 

THE BLOODY PRIZE

So our first award goes to a lady who has inspired us all by her fabulous quilts, but despite entering our challenges, competitions etc. always refuses to take the prize.  Now there might be a good reason for this i.e. she has usually donated the prizes, but tonight she cannot refuse.  

So the award for the “Winner who won't take a bloody prize”  goes to 

JO

                                               Jo does her best Meryl Streep impression

                     AWARD FOR THE BIGGEST SCRAP BIN

Our second award goes to another beautiful quilter, who produces some amazing work, but when you say how much you love her choice of fabric and colour,  She says "oh I just used my scraps" 

So the award for  “The Biggest Scrap Bin”  goes to

JANET

Janet is far too polite to say "what the f**k is this?

AWARD FOR MOST WORKSHOPS ATTENDED

this should actually read "her husband and children miss her as they've run out of  food and clean clothes"

Our next award  FOR THE MOST ATTENDED WORKSHOPS goes to a woman who was so dedicated to her role as Events Secretary on the committee that her husband had these posters placed all over the city.  This award goes to

HEATHER

AWARD FOR NOT MAKING A QUILT WITHOUT

 A BIRD ON IT

During lockdown it was difficult to get inspiration but one member seemed to spend her whole time tweeting, No not tweeting that's not the word, twittering? nope that's not it either Ornothologying?  Oh forget it.  The award for “not making a quilt unless there is a bird on it”, goes to

KAREN

this is Karen attempting to show Mags how to fly

AWARD FOR THE MOST USE OF THE SAME PATTERN

I am glad to report that as a group we have embraced upcycling and recycling, but one of our members has taking this much further than the rest of us by using one pattern again and again. So the award for the “most use of a pattern” goes to

                    BARBARA

Now sadly Barbara can’t be here tonight, so she collect it later

                                                   we tracked her down eventually and made her take it

AWARD FOR THE UGLIEST QUILT

The next award goes to a lady who very kindly gave us all an excuse for making that one quilt that was “Just plain ugly”  And that excuse is “ save it for when when you end up in a retirement home because no one will steal it”  Priceless.

This award for Ugly Quilt excuse goes to 

         LIZ

it should be pointed out that Liz was the person who described it as the ugliest quilt  in the first place. But she was right. It was. However Liz would like to add that it was beautifully sewn

AWARD FOR MAKER OF THE BEST SCONES WITH A PHD (the maker that is, not the scones)

Now for all you new ladies, I’d like you to be aware that Cake is very important to the guild members.  We don’t really care if they are bought or made.  But what I will say is: If the winner of this category is attending a Sunday sewing day and has made her scones then you should try to be at that meeting.  She has perfected the art of scones during lockdown, while completing her Masters. 

So the Thank you for the Calories award goes to our new chair

     SHEILA

Sheila would like us to remind Liz that, after tasting her strawberry scones she famously said "i'll not ask for the recipe..."

AWARD FOR QUILT WITH THE MOST CAT HAIR

We are now into the most contested category of the evening.  In fact Sheila was close to winning this one too but was disqualified as her cat showed her bottom to us one too many times on Zoom, and Cat might have won if she had not made quilts specifically for this purpose and therefore excluding herself.

  The award for the most cat hair on a quilt goes to 

LUCY

i was robbed! Lucy only beat me because Sula is 30% cat, 70% fur

AWARD FOR MEMBER WITH THE MOST CRAFTY HOBBIES

My goodness what a talented bunch of ladies we are,  We quilt, some of us crochet, some of us paint, some of us dabble in flower making, others in embroidery, mosaique work,  dyeing our own fabric,  most of us do several crafts, but there is one lady who does it all

so “the award for the most crafty crafter” goes to 

SUZANNE

Suzanne's award has so much stuff attached to it that you can barely see the mannequin. Having seen Suzanne's sewing room, if she puts it down in there it will probably never be seen again

AWARD FOR THE LONGEST WIP

We all have a quilt that we have been working on for what seems like forever, mostly these are a hand sewn hexagons that we have just given up the ghost on, however there is one guild member who is making a masterpiece and when its finished it will probably be  a priceless antique

so the award for the longest Work in Progress goes to

PAM

This is a present for Pam's sister. By the time she gets to the end of it, the fabric she used in the beginning will have disintegrated 

AWARD FOR THE QUILTER NEAREST TO BREAKING THE LAND SPEED RECORD

We have all had times when we have to get a bit of a move on. Some of us struggle with the concept of  deadlines (mainly Jo) but the winner here has been known to finish a quilt before she's even started it. This astonishing speed even covers the time she spends unpicking the bits she's got wrong, and the the time at the end when she finally gets round to reading the instructions. The effect of this hyperspeed affects the quilters around her too. Those who have ever collaborated can often be seen wandering around in a daze, muttering to themselves, and rarely volunteer to undergo the experience again.They need to be left alone in a quiet room with a pile of patterns until they recover. She is the only member who has a standing order for stitch unpickers

              Tonight's award for the fastest quilter in the land goes to our host

                                                     MAGS

Finally I would like to award the Thank Goodness she's a Member award to someone who during lockdown ran several blocks of the week., she delivered fabric to us during those scrubs days, and printed out paper pieces for a EPP project that we need to complete.  She has ran cricut courses for those of us who really needed to buy another gadget then didn’t know how to use it,  She ran paper flower classes on a regular basis, she writes our blog, takes our minutes, she reminded me of all the things I had to do in time for me to do them, she made most of tonight's awards and she deserves all our thanks. 

So the Thank Goodness she's a member award goes to

CAT

It’s November at the EMQG

Another month has gone by and this one marked our return to our New Lanark retreats. It’s been 18 months since the last one, which was 3 weeks before lockdown and the idea that people were fighting over toilet rolls caused much hilarity. Little did we know what was coming! We have a huge function room to ourselves (it is really a very bright room but most of the daylight gets absorbed by the world’s most hideous carpet)

This is the sewing room on Saturday morning, everyone working away on various projects 

This is the sewing room half an hour later when word got round that there’s a maker’s market in the car park

Mags wondering how it’s possible that she’s been here for a day and has only completed 15 projects

 

Sheila’s Halloween project underway. It might possibly be finished by next year 

Lucy’s lockdown quilt is almost big enough to cover the carpet

Lucy looking cheerful despite not being allowed to go to bed until she’s finished the quilting

A really clever idea by Audrey to make this beautiful holly, and one which we’ll all be stealing straight away and claiming we thought of it ourselves

Karen has almost finished another storage container to put some of the the large pile of stuff on her table

Lucy celebrating finally being allowed to go home after finishing her quilt

Everyone trying to hide from the staff as they try to get them to leave 

The misery of having to leave our lovely retreat and the constant feeding of our faces was helped by having guild night to look forward to. And this month we are featuring our favourite lockdown quilts

This is Karen’s finished quilt from the Sheila Frampton Cooper workshop. Please note that there is not a single bird in this piece. We applaud her attempts to break her addiction

This is Catriona, one of our new members. This is her own design

                

                 This is one of Barbara’s many lockdown quilts

This is another of the lockdown QAL quilts. This one belongs to Heather, who not only made the quilt, but also corrected all my quilt maths in the design 

This is an illustration of the ingratitude of people’s children. This lovely quilt by Audrey was made for her french bulldog-owning daughter. She was so delighted with it that she put it straight in a cupboard. Audrey has now repossessed it and is planning to disinherit her daughter

At last! This is the full size and complete finished lockdown QAL by Lucy!

Last seen gracing the carpet from hell as it was dragged from sewing machine to ironing board by the increasingly weary Lucy

                              And this is the fabulous back!

      Juliet’s choice of lockdown quilt was her gynaecologically   themed piece made during Irene Roderick’s Zoom workshop 

This is Helen’s stunning rainbow version of the lockdown quilt

Apparently the Festival of Quilts judges didn’t like the background fabric in Jo’s lovely quilt. Obviously no taste

This is from Avril, another one of our new members. This is her Avery garland quilt which she worked on during lockdown

And this is Mag’s lockdown quilt, and so recently taken off Barbara’s longarm that this was the first time Mags had seen it

And this is Barbara’s other recent piece of work. It’s our Quiltcon community challenge quilt, finally quilted and bound and all ready for it’s trip to Arizona

That’s it for this month. Next month is our Christmas 

party night, complete with our bottle bag (obviously containing a bottle!) swap