MID-WESTERN BRANCH OF THE IRISH PATCHWORK SOCIETY: September 2017

Sunday, 10 September 2017

Branch Meeting September 8, 2017

We held our first branch meeting of the new year at the Baptist Church on Friday night, September 8. It was a busy night at the door with membership dues as well as our usual meet and greet with raffle tickets. We had a much larger number of visitors than usual, and we all made an effort to help them feel welcome. It's great to have a so many new faces at our meeting as well as all of our friends.

Sew Crafty Fabrics with Avril Riordin provided the shop for the night. She brought so many bright and beautiful fabrics, thank you for traveling with your wares!

Frances Shanahan, our new president, ran the meeting with style and grace. We had a new type of guest speaker, a yoga teacher Sara Cory. She demonstrated some mindfulness techniques and hand stretches, great for quilters who spend hours at our sewing machines. Namaste.

Our meeting challenge was to create a name tag. We had five entries, and we voted during the meeting. Our winner was Liz Stanley. Well done, Liz.

Tracy Watson explained her workshop which will take place next month on October 14. She will be teaching methods for couching threads to create different textures.

We had another completed quilt from our 2.5 inch squares challenge! Claire Lynch showed her completed challenge quilt.

Many quilters shared their summer projects in the Show and Share this month. Thank you to everyone who was able to attend and we hope to see our friends who could not make it next month! A larger set of photos is posted on our flickr feed: https://www.flickr.com/photos/midwestpatchwork/sets/72157686426009464

Thank you to everyone who attended and helped to make our meeting a great success.

European Quilt Association in the Birmingham Festival of Quilts

The Irish Patchwork Society (IPS) is a member of the European's Quilter's Association (EQA). Each year the EQA puts together a gallery in the Birmingham Festival of Quilts where each country contributes an equal number of quilts according to a theme. The quilts must be of a specific size and follow the guidelines that are decided by the international committee. The International Representative for Ireland is a member of our branch, Paula Rafferty. Thank you to Paula Rafferty for her work in helping to make this gallery a huge success. It's the only gallery like it in the Festival of Quilts, and many quilters report it as one of the highlights of the show.

Ireland always has a wide range of quilts representing quilters throughout Ireland, with all 8 branches of the Irish Patchwork Society invited to to contribute. This year the Irish quilts were on the theme "Inspired by the New York Beauty Block."