Since somebody has to be in charge of guild programs, and this year I’m “it” for my modern guild, I’ve been publishing some ideas for guild programs and challenges. Hopefully, if you are in charge of programs and challenges for your guild, you can use some of these.
The familiar “cat” tessellation
Nobody volunteered to do the program this month, so I read up on tessellations, starting with this post my friend Jean did for my blog a couple of years ago. I found a couple of great books on tessellations, one by Jinny Byer (yes, that Jinny Byer!). They are:
Designing Tessellations: The Secrets of Interlocking Patterns, by Jinny Byer
Introduction to Tessellations, by Dale Seymour and Jill Britton
And if you decide to develop a program on tessellations for your guild, feel free to e-mail me. You can have my “class outline” and list of exercises if you want.
Wonky house drawn with Electric Quilt 7
The challenge for next month is to make a 12-1/2 inch (so it will finish 12 inches) wonky house block. I made up a couple of blocks to illustrate the idea and drew a couple of additional ones for people to take home for inspiration.
Another wonky house drawing for inspiration
I cut the pieces for this house freehand, with scissors, to make it really wonky
This one was made with fused fabric, using techniques I learned several years ago from Laura Wasilowski
We’ll vote on whether to have a “dirty Santa” swap or a drawing where one person gets all the blocks to make a quilt. Seems like most of our members are really into the swap thing, so I’m betting that’s what happens!
Zippy Quilts 
I am on the program committee for my guild. It’s a “traditional” guild but members make all different kinds of quilts. We try to balance the interests in scheduling presentations, with some traditional block quilts, modern, art, technique like applique, quilting, piecing tricks, etc. We have an auction about every other year, with members donating quilting-related things, some fabric, some notions, some UFOs… We bring in an auctioneer to run it, and we make decent money for the guild. It’s a pretty big challenge to get all the moving parts together.
Love the tesselations. I recently bought the Jinny Beyer book and a Ruth McDowell book, too. LOTS of information and inspiration. I have yet to try stuff, though!
People enjoyed the tessellation program. I had lots of hands-on things for them to try.