River Rat TOGA Raffle Quilt

  9.5" unfinished block

Dear River Rat Togateers,
As you know we will not be meeting for a Sew-In this Spring. We still want to have a raffle quilt ready for the River Rat Toga in September even if we have to save it for next year.

We are designing this year's quilt around four 24" blocks that were made by Cindy Peters. We want to add more star blocks around them in order to arrive at a 66" x 72" top.  We put out a call earlier and asked for assorted 3.5", 6.5" and 9.5" unfinished STAR blocks.

I have designed a simple quilt that is built with four quadrants.  We are planning to have you mail your blocks to a central person (me) who will scramble them all up (for color variation) and then send them to four volunteers who will assemble them into their quadrants and then send them on to the next volunteer who will put the four pieces together.   OUR MAIL BY DATE IS MAY 8TH!

9.5" unfinished block.

This is what we need for the star blocks.
Thirty two (32)
6.5" unfinished blocks.
They can be made up of one 6.5" blocks
OR
Four 3.5" blocks.

Sixteen (16)
9.5" unfinished blocks.
They can be made up of one 9.5" block
OR
Nine 3.5" blocks
OR
One 6.5" and five 3.5" unfinished blocks
OR 
Four 4.5" unfinished blocks.
We would appreciate you sending one or more 10" light background pieces (just in case we need to fill in some spots.) when you send your blocks. Or send any of the other sizes if you can.

Cindy's block with muslin shown on the left and white on the right. 
If this doesn't look like a pale creamy yellow the computer color is incorrect.
It is NOT a tan color.

Color and Star Rules                                          
All the backgrounds should be light and scrappy unless you prefer to use a single background color.
The backgrounds can be anything from the white and the muslin shown above to the creamy light yellow that is in Cindy's block,
The star points can be any color you want.  They can be monochromatic or multicolored and scrappy.
The stars can float inside the block or reach to the edge of the quarter inch seam.

6.5" unfinished block with a scrappy background.

Send your blocks to Nancy Drew.  
OUR MAIL BY DATE IS MAY 8TH!
My address and phone numbers will be posted on the River Rat Toga.io site and the Minn/Wisc Junkies.io site.
You may also leave a message for me in the comments and I will answer them.

These blocks are not patterns you must follow.  They just happen to be the ones I made. They really are square, it is just the camera angle. - N.

A tap on the pictures will enlarge them.

6.5" unfinished block.

Remember, OUR MAIL BY DATE IS MAY 8TH!
Hugs, Nancy

Vintage Sewing Machines and Quilts

Hello there Mary and Jeni,
I am busy getting ready for the Quilt show this weekend. We have done lots of organizing and I hope we don't have any problems. It will be exciting to see who wins the raffle quilt, shown above. I sold a lot of tickets. Of course if Dad hadn't bought 5o I would have only sold 60 tickets. However he did buy 50 and so I think there is a good chance that someone I sold a ticket to will win the quilt.
We do sell a lot of tickets but I have about a 15% chance of being the seller of the winning ticket.
The other thing I have been doing is getting Faye's beautiful vintage sewing machines up and running. She is going to have a vintage sewing machine display to coincide with the Quilt show and we need to spiff them up. I have been working there all week and it is a lot of fun. I hope to get some of mine up to the quilt show too.
Other than that we are just watching baseball and watching the rain. We have had about a week of gloomy weather. However it is supposed to get down around 32 degrees tonight so we might have a clear sky and that may very well mean we have frost and that will be the end of the flowers in the garden. It has already been cold enough to stop the morning glories.
I have just finished Potshot on the Spenser series. He is getting better as he ages. I don't know how much longer he can keep this up though. Spenser must be getting really old.
I have started reading an occasional Sunny Randall story as it comes up in order. I am up to 2001 now because they talk about 9/11. I am glad you encouraged me to read them. Parker is a lot of fun.
Love,
Nancy