Quilting with the Knitwits

This is S., our quilting teacher. She loooooves to quilt and does a beautiful job.

A couple Christmases ago she showed us some quilted tote bags that she made for Christmas presents and we all wanted one. She refused to make them for us.

She's not very c-o-o-p-e-r-a-t-i-v-e.

We even offered to pay her. Sheesh, ten bags aren't that many to make.

We moved on to Plan B. Plan B was making them ourselves. She graciously offered to do a class and show us how to make them. We jumped right on that. A year and a half later.

Anyway, tonight was the night we got together to piece the outer part of the bags. We had six sewing machines, six sewers, and one gopher. The gopher was sissy. She doesn't sew. I had to sew for her.
But she was very good at getting everyone's pieces as they needed them, ironing most of the sections for all of us and pouring us wine.
S. and I had bought jelly rolls for this project from various sources. Jelly rolls, for all you non-sewers, are lots of pieces of fabric pre-cut into 2.5" strips. We simply cut them into 5" pieces for this project. Sissy did all the cutting this afternoon since she knew I would be doing the sewing tonight.

[Plus I was helping K. and my niece re-purpose a t-shirt into a shrug. You can get the directions for that project here.]
PKB is reading the instructions, trying to figure out what she's doing.
B. is measuring her stitched together piece. She and I must sew a generous 1/4" seam allowance since we both came up short and had to add an extra row. My fancy-schmancy sewing machine can't fix that.
We're not quite finished. Actually, we're not even close to finishing. We have to go back on Sunday.

Teacher said so.