QuiltCon Block Challenge: Quilt Top

This is part of a series of posts about the QuiltCon Block Challenge.  You can see more photos of blocks submitted for this challenge here, and in the Block Challenge Flickr Group.  

Here is the finished quilt top! I wanted to keep things as simple as possible, so I just sashed all the blocks in white, which blends nicely with the white that is in so many of the blocks already.

I love the fact that the top already has “MQG” and “QuiltCon” on it, but I also wanted to add the location and dates.

Rebecca Roach‘s Texas block seemed like a good place to add “Austin” in embroidery.

I knew that Karen Alexander was concerned that her armadillo didn’t have an eye, so I gave him one. I also embroidered the dates of QuiltCon along his back.

Hopefully Rebecca and Karen aren’t too upset about my changes to their blocks!

I’m really happy with how this turned out. Check back on Thursday to see what I did with the back.

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As a way of giving something back to QuiltCon’s host city of Austin, Texas, we’re going to use the blocks that aren’t selected for this quilt to make quilts for each of the 46 beds at the Austin Children’s Shelter. This will be MQG’s first large-scale charity project and we look forward to both using the many beautiful blocks we received for the challenge and getting as many guilds as possible involved in the process! Participating guilds will receive a package of 7 or more blocks (much like the groups of blocks being shown in these blog posts) to expand into a 68″ X 88″ Twin bed quilt. This can be accomplished by adding blocks, adding negative space, or some combination of the two. The quilts will need to be machine quilted, bound, washed, and shipped to Austin in advance of QuiltCon. MQG will also be interested in hearing about each guild’s process and will feature the completed quilts in a series of blog posts in Spring 2013.

If your guild is interested in this project, please e-mail info@quiltcon.com to let us know.