Meeting Recap (November 9, 2019)

Thank you to everyone who came out to Saturday's meeting! It was lovely to see everyone again (it was a packed house!), and we hope you all had a great time.

• Gayle, our Treasurer, gave us the updated financial info. It's time to pay your 2020 dues, which are holding steady at $40 for next year. You can pay via our Paypal link or by cash, check, or charge at our December meeting. Dues are due by December 31 to remain a member in good standing.
• Gayle, standing in as secretary, also announced our membership numbers and passed out our MQG and STLMQG membership pins. We're now over 160 members! Note: This year, the MQG is no longer sending printed membership cards. If you'd like a paper copy to use for discounts, etc., you can access and print it online. To access your digital card, log in to your MQG account, click on "My Dashboard" in the right sidebar, then click the orange "Membership Card" link at the top of your profile page.
• Marie, our VP, announced several pieces of quilting news and happenings (more about these will be sent via email).
• Jessica, our President, covered several items:
• This month's Hand-Sew Happy Hour will take place on Thursday, November 21 at a private member's home. More info will be sent in our newsletter. This is our last hand sew of the year, as we take a break in December for the holidays.
• Thank you to the SewMeSTL Committee (Heather Benz, Gretchen Watkin, Vicki Ash, Emily Amizich, Pam Hartig, Jenn Deck, Jolene Grosch, and Robyn Passig) for a wonderful retreat this year. We really appreciate all the hard work you put into the event. You can read a recap here.
• QuiltCon will be held in Austin Feb. 20-23. Member registration for classes and entries for the quilt show are now open. Quilt entries are due by Dec. 2.
• Our meeting locations have been set for next year. We're having to split between two locations due to construction at the Heights. All dates and locations have been updated on our Meeting Info page.
• We are happy to announce our new board members for 2020: Emily Amizich (President), Pam Hartig (Vice President), Lilo Whitener-Fey (Secretary), and Tess McMahon (Treasurer) will be taking the reigns in January. Thank you all for being willing to serve, as well as to the other members who applied for the positions.
• 2020 committee sign-ups are open! A link to sign up will be in this week's newsletter.

• We began collecting donations for our December ticket raffle, and boy did we get some good stuff. Don't forget -- you can still donate at the December meeting. All the info can be found here.
• Terry Darling and Marge Thomas collected the remaining blocks for our QuiltCon charity quilt and gave us a sneak peek of the quilt. It looks so great! They'll be assembling the quilt with some help this week, then passing it off to Lilo Whitener-Fey for longarming. Thanks again to everyone who's helped out!

• The Charity Committee collected the last of our quilt donations for the Project Linus project. We'll announce the total number of quilts soon, but suffice it to say, it's going to be a big number. Thank you to the committee (Gina Shelley, Lilo Whitener-Fey, Nancy Dlugosz, Emily DuBois, Ann Philiph, Patti Hawkins, Erin Chan, and Amy Suiter) for all of their hard work; to everyone who made a quilt; and to our wonderful longarmers and Nancy Dlugosz, who donated their quilting and binding services for monthly giveaways.
• For this month's activity, we did some in-depth demos on using Creativebug and Instagram. We hope you found them helpful! Members had a lot of great questions and tips to add as well.
• After the break, participants revealed their entries in the Mini Masterpiece Challenge (details on the challenge can be found here). It was fun to see the variety in all the wonderful pieces our members created. Good work to everyone who challenged themselves to combine and use colors in a new way, and congrats to our winners, Marilynn Maurer (monochromatic category and viewers’ choice), Pam Hartig (complimentary category), and Jan Ochterbeck (analogous category)!

• We wrapped up the meeting with another great Show and Tell, including these beauties by Sue Jackson, Erika Walden, and Patti Baymiller, among many others. Keep an eye on our Instagram page to see lots more pics of the meeting, show and tell, and our members' projects throughout the month.