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Despite some snow earlier in the day in this very snowy November, there was a good turnout for our meeting. Grace Noel  Our youngest guest speaker ever was Grace Noel, an aspiring and already accomplished surface pattern designer from Almonte. Grace is pictured here wearing a skirt she made from her own fabric design. Grace started off by explaining that "surface pattern design" is art that is specifically created to be repeated across a surface of material. That material includes fabric or wallpaper, and the designs can be florals, geometrics and a host of other designs that we see in our fabrics. Her work involves colours, themes, scale and much more. The repeat factor was her initial challenge which she has now mastered. Grace's designs are often inspired by nature and vintage items - she's particularly fond of calicos from the 1930's. Grace draws her designs by hand using any medium at hand including markers, pencils, pastels, crayons or paint. She then scans and uploads the design to her computer and edits it using Adobe Photoshop. Grace achieved an early success during her final year in her design program at Algonquin College. She secured a placement at Moda (Moda!!! we were really impressed by this!) and her project was to design a collection of fabrics to celebrate Canada's 150th birthday which was coming up in 2017. She described the iterative design process where she submitted designs to Moda, and then modified them based on their feedback. This process repeated through a few cycles. She showed us designs that both did and didn't make it into the set of final 5 designs that comprised the 21 piece fabric collection. She was understandably very excited to see her name on the fabric selvages! Grace's current goal is to extend her designs to home decor items and to sell her designs to manufacturers. And she would also like to make a quilted item of Grandmother's Flower Garden blocks.  You can view and purchase Grace's over designs, currently numbering over 190, at her Spoonflower online store, www.spooonflower.com/graceful and follow her on her blog www.creativelygraceful.blogspot.ca And please do remember her request that if you ever make something with her fabric, to send her a photo of it to creativelygrace@gmail.com We were delighted to meet Grace. She was an interesting, entertaining and excellent presenter who clearly has a bright future ahead of her. We wish you much success and happiness Grace! And we'll be eagerly following your progress towards your current and future goals.
Charity We had an excellent response to our late-ish request for placemats and Christmas gift bags. Thanks to everyone who contributed to these important Christmas outreach initiatives, and to Anne Cruickshank for coordinating this endeavour.
An amazing 85 fabric gift bags were also donated. These will be filled and distributed by the Arnprior and District Food Bank in their Christmas parcels.
 And 14 beautiful little preemie quilts were donated, bringing our total to 46. These will be distributed to babies in the neo-natal unit at the Ottawa Hospital, Civic campus. Check out our Charity page for more information about all of these outreach initiatives. Show and Tell Show and Tell featured an impressive large number of our members' quilts and other quilted items! Everyone must be gearing up for the holiday season with gifts and other decorative items. We also saw several lovely completed big bags from the recent Big Bag workshop whose participants were very excited that they completed the bag at the workshop! Click/tap to see Show and Tell photos and photos from the workshop. Draws Our meeting wrapped up with our draws and some happy winners!
Block of the month: Joyce Trafford Guess the number of pages in the library book: Johanne Vjada 50-50 draw: Claudette Trail Gift Basket: Nancy Hayley Comments are closed.
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