The women of the DNFW have produced something awesome once again! Here is our quilt in the works for Penny Simkin. I had a great time working on it and was so thankful for all the women who came to help out. I don't think we could have finished the top without you!!
9:30 am on March 29th 
Rhoda, Jillian and I made the decision to applique the women onto the lightest yellow fabric (instead of cutting the light yellow and sewing to the women). Shelly arrived a bit later having to 'deal' with our decision. :)
We all sewed in a mad fury in the begining whilst Shelly bravely cut every piece of fabric for us to sew. We'd settled on a pattern Shelly and I had used at a Project Linus Retreat. Because Rhoda and I had bought the fabric in groups of 4 color shades it seemd like this pattern could really work for us. And it was a "stack and whack" which tends to go a lot faster. 
Jillian got to sew for the first time during the begining stages. As the quilt progressed she graciously moved to the MOST important part -- ironing. Ask any quilter -- ironing can make or break a quilt. :)
We decided we loved the mothers so much in the middle that we should scatter them throughout. So we cut some more mamas out of the pannel to use in the corners of each color grade.
At mid-day we'd sewn enough blocks to start laying things out and see what color combonations we liked. Rhoda is working on it a bit to see how to best fade the colors from light yellow to dark purple.
I guess now is a good time to say what our goal was. We wanted to give Penny something that represented birthing mothers. There is NO fabric out there that does that so we found some great fabric that illustrated mothers and some looked like squatting birth positions. The light yellow middle is the womb and it is placed closest to the bottom of the quilt to represent the low womb. Then the life-light spreads out to purple (which I've seen Penny wear a lot so I thought she'd like).
Connie arrived in the afternoon about the time we were finishing up the purple blocks and begining to sew the rows of the quilt to one another. Shelly helped get the corners to match and we were in awe as she brought it all together. 
DONE!!
Pictures with a flash tend to make the purple look more blue. Just disregard. :)
Special thanks to Rhoda and Dan for giving up some of their 'no kid' time for the DNFW and letting us use their awesome basement to convene in. And also to Shelly, without whom our quilt would have take two months to complete. Thanks Jillian, Rhoda, Shelly and Connie for giving your time and sarcastic humor to make this such a fun experience!! Maybe we just need a DNFW crafting day once every few months! ;)
