Tuesday Night Group: Bev & Friends, Happy Villages

In an earlier post, I promised to write about quilter Beverly's goddess doll collection, which is several hundred strong.  Beverly started making the dolls as a guild project, and by the time she stopped, she had made something like 300 of them....now she has the task of stuffing them.  Each one is different and has its own beauty, like people.  She brings them to our Tuesday night gathering, and if anyone is taking a break, or has come to a point where they can stop early, we help her with the project.  When she has finished stuffing them, she will be embellishing them with all kinds of features, ornaments, and accessories.

During the summer, we decided that on the fifth Tuesday, one of us would show the others how to do something...a technique or a mini-workshop.  The first one was lead by me, and the group chose Happy Villages.  Karen Eckmeier, the creator of Happy Villages, taught this at Garden State Quilters a while ago.  It is a wonderful fabric collage project, a great way of using scraps of all kinds of fabrics, and one of the most stress-free projects I've ever done.  The hardest part was convincing the group not to stress over how they laid out their backgrounds!  By the end of the evening, I think they understood why I kept saying, "it doesn't matter" over and over again.  You cannot mess up this project.  It would be fun to do with kids as well, as long as you trust them with scissors, or you could do the cutting for them.   A village can be completed in just a few hours.  We swapped fabrics and laughed throughout the evening.  Next week, we'll finish up the project, giving the group a chance to practice their FMQ skills on the quilt top. I took photos of the four villages.