Home from Mobile

I drove home last night from a wonderful visit to Mobile, AL. I visited the Azalea City Quilters Guild. They are a fun group of women and I completely enjoyed every minute of my time there. This is the group as they were just arriving. By the time I took the stage, it was standing room only, and I swear every single one of them was grinning at me! So many beautiful smiling faces!

As part of the show and tell section of the meeting (always my favorite!) one quilter had 'rescued' these vintage tops and repaired then quilted them. They were so stunning! I fell in love with the butterflies, and she somehow managed to remove them from their original backgrounds (of questionable fabric content) and turned them into this gorgeous quilt!

She also pointed out that this quilt top had never been quilted because the top two rows were sewn to the bottom three at the wrong place. Notice how they are shifted to the right? She just removed the last row from the right and added it to the left. I ADORE this quilt. I love it's quirkiness and all of it's humble non-perfection. To me, this quilt IS perfect. It's so much more interesting than if it had been executed exactly as intended. LOL

And my heart skipped a beat when I saw this quilt. I think we all know how I feel about scrappy quilts and this one has so much scrappy happiness I can hardly stand it. I love that the blocks are going different directions, and that some of them are pieced 'incorrectly' and that the fabrics in each block are often 'substituted' in portions of the blocks. All of that, combined with stripes going different directions and prints mixed with plaids, this quilt made me fall in love.

And then after the meeting, my lovely hosts drove me out to the west end beach on Dauphin Island. The beach is truly my happy place! I wiggled my toes in the sand and stood in the surf and felt my whole body relax. It was wonderful.

Even though it was a hot and sunny day, the breeze felt so good. We walked along the beach and asked some snorkelers what they found (not much according to them because the waves were churning up lots of sand apparently.) But it was a beautiful day to be above water for sure!

And if that wasn't enough, this is the view I woke up to. I could lay in bed and enjoy this gorgeous view of the Fowl River. The marsh area and docks were home to lots of wildlife.

In the evening I went down and sat at the end of the dock and enjoyed watching the fish jumping and brown pelicans and seagulls diving for their dinner. It was so entertaining and peaceful. I'm pretty sure this view and the visit to the beach lowered my blood pressure.

The next day we had a fun QUILTING WITH RULERS workshop. I had an amazing group of women who brought some fantastic quilt tops to share. We explored different options for quilting them and spent a lot of time discussing how to divide quilts into quilting spaces, how to fill those spaces, and using rulers along with free motion to create 'pathways' to fill the quilt with quilting and reduce over-stitching and tie offs.

I was so busy teaching that I forgot to take any photos at all. But we laughed and shared and learned and I know these amazing quilters are going to have fun trying their new skills in future quilts.

Thanks for inviting me to Mobile, I enjoyed every minute of it!

Enjoy every stitch,
Diane

PS, if you would like me to visit your guild or group, get more information HERE.