Did you catch our December 2021 Quilted Joy Clubhouse online meeting? 2021 is our year of grid designs! This month we looked at how to machine quilt grid designs for floral quilts. If you missed the livestream it’s available to watch (or re-watch!) whenever you’d like. Find it on the Quilted Joy Youtube channel or on the Quilted Joy Clubhouse page on our website!

Our main program for this month’s meeting was how to machine quilt grid designs with a floral theme. Watch the video below to see Angela's floral grid designs, and so much more!

Grid Designs for Floral Quilts

During this Quilted Joy Clubhouse meeting, we looked at two floral grid designs. The first flower grid fits within groups of four. Each flower will have four petals with a petal in each square of your grid. While quilting your petals, think of a flattened heart, a molar tooth, or even a four leaf clover like someone mentioned in the chat! We also debated whether we prefer a single vein or two. Most people seemed to prefer two. What do you think?

Our second floral design has a more baroque, old world floral look. Or as someone said in the comments, it looks like a gnome's head! This design looks beautiful stacked up in a block or it can be adapted for a border as well. This is one that you'll want to practice on paper a few times to make sure you've memorized the path before taking it to your machine.

Looky Loo Tour with Gail

We had so much fun in our Looky Loo tour with Gail Murray from Alberta, Canada. Gail's quilting and crafting studio is set up in her basement. The first thing you'll see when you walk down the stairs into her basement is her APQS Millie on a 12 foot table. Her machine is set up along the length of her basement and she has plenty of room to get behind it for loading and pantograph quilting. And who wouldn't love the gorgeous wall of thread displayed behind her machine too? It's hard to choose my favorite feature of Gail's studio. It could be the baskets of fabric hanging from the ceiling, or maybe it's the bookshelves on casters, or the peel and stick wallpaper on the risers of her stairs! It's too hard to choose! You can also tell Gail loves organizing with all her bookshelves and labelled drawers. She also highly recommends a label maker for labeling all your storage too! Thanks again to Gail for giving us a tour of her fabulous quilting studio!

Tula Pink's Saturdaze Wide Backing Fabrics

How fun are these new 108" wide backing fabrics from Tula Pink? These are the Saturdaze 108" Wide Quilt Backing Fabrics by Tula Pink.

How Would You Quilt It? Sheryl's Scrappy Quilt

For this month's How Would You Quilt It portion of our Quilted Joy Clubhouse meeting, we looked at how Angela might quilt Sheryl's fun scrappy quilt. Scrappy quilts and quilts with busy prints can be challenging to create a quilting design. Your quilting can get lost in all those colors and prints. Sometimes that's exactly what you want, but if you're custom quilting you don't want all your hard work to go unnoticed!

Angela thought this quilt would be perfect to treat as a giant grid! Think of each block of the quilt as a section of your grid. You can fill it with any of the designs we've discussed during our 2021 Year of the Grid. During the meeting, Angela drew our baroque floral/gnome design from earlier in each block. Depending on the size of the blocks, Sheryl may need to fill them in a bit more with echoing, curls, or any other simple filler. This is a fun quilt and we can't wait to see how Sheryl chooses to quilt it!

Show and Tell

We love to wrap up the QJ Clubhouse meetings with a little show and tell. There are so many talented quilters in the Quilted Joy Clubhouse on Facebook and they share lots of amazing quilts. It’s fun to put a spotlight on their hard work!

Join Us Next Month!

The Quilted Joy Clubhouse live meetings occur on the first Wednesday of each month at 1pm Eastern. Our next Clubhouse meeting will be January 5, 2021 at 1pm Eastern/Noon Central and we’ll be starting our Year of Rulers! If you’d like to watch live, you can find us on Facebook in the Quilted Joy Clubhouse or subscribe to the Quilted Joy Youtube channel to be notified about our videos. Don’t worry if you can’t join us live. The video will remain available on both Facebook and Youtube afterwards so you can watch whenever you want!

Hope to “see” you at the next live meeting!