Our quilter this month is Lauren MacDonald who resides in Silver Water. She was inspired to quilt by watching her grandmother making quilts, and knew that when she retired she too wanted to start quilting. When she retired she joined the Happy Quilters group and attended their meetings to observe and talk to the members about the art of quilting. After her first year with the Happy Quilters group she finally started to quilt.
Twenty years ago she joined the Island Quilters Guild, while it was still located in Little Current and has been a member ever since. Lauren has held several positions in the guild including president, currently puts out a monthly newsletter for its members, and is on the Block of the Month and Quilt Show committees. Lauren won an award with her friendship themed quilt which she entered in the 2018Trend-Tex fundraiser of the Canadian Quilters Association. She says that she is slow to finish projects so does not enter her quilts, she likes to try new things and frequently those end up in the UFO (or unfinished project) pile.
Her favourite style of quilting is creating patchwork quilt blocks and making patchwork quilts, she finds applique and handwork take too long for her to finish so she seldom makes any of those. For new quilters Lauren offers this advice, try making some different blocks, don’t pick too ambitious a quilt for your first efforts. As well, make friends with more experienced quilters and join a quilt club where they can gain new ideas or get help when stuck.
Lauren’s favourite quilt is the memory quilt she made for her mom. In it she created different blocks to represent various stages of her mom’s life, like a Carolina Lily block, or a Mothers Love block. The quilt featured a lot of red as that was her mom’s favourite color. Her mom used the quilt on her bed, and now it resides with Lauren as a reminder of her mom.
A Winters Day is the quilt she has chosen to share here, it is a 50” wide by 40” high wall hanging, one of four quilts she hangs in her sunroom. It is a new technique that she tried, using a stabilizer material and also thread stitched the outline of her house on the lower section. Sharing the upper right corner to show the details.
If you would like to learn about quilting, come out to the Island Quilters Guild monthly meetings held at the Community Centre in Mindemoya on the third Thursday of the month at 7pm. For more information you can phone or text Kathrine Grant at 519-495-0309, or email Deborah Grant at dgrant098@gmail.com.
