What a week!

 

It’s a short post this week. Most of my time has been consumed in prep for this week, with too many major events crammed together.

Yesterday went well with a high of 75 attendees to the January Jumpstart for the Northern California Quilt Council. I serve on the Board of NCQC and Rochelle Rosales and I did a presentation for participating guilds on “Successfully Recruiting and Retaining Volunteers”. A lot has changed for guilds and NCQC hopes to help guilds navigate these tumultuous waters.

NCQC has been instrumental for me since I began teaching. Until COVID, I got the majority of my leads from their Meet the Teacher events. So I am grateful to be able to give back. We hope the event was useful for the participating guilds, we were quite pleased with the turnout. I didn’t think to get a screen shot, but then again, most screenshots look alike.

And….Craft Napa kicked off today! I think there were over 175 students and teachers in attendance for the kick off party. Spirits were very high!

So many people expressed appreciation for a virtual Craft Napa. For many, this was an unexpected pleasure – to be able to attend Craft Napa. It was heartwarming to hear some of the stories of people who would have never been able to attend in person, people who could not have taken then time off of work, those who are caregivers to loved ones, etc. Craft Napa really is a unique experience.

I have spent days and days with various issues with my video editing. I am teaching Doodle Quilting at Craft Napa and part of the class is focused on various fills. I gave students a vote to choose their top 4 favorites out of 16 choices and I will cover 7 – 10 in class, but committed to tutorials on all 16.

At first I intended to just do written tutorials, which I did. I then decided to do videos for each also. There is a problem with doing live stitching in class. You know I will run out of bobbin thread, my thread will break, I’ll have a thread barf incident, etc. I don’t mind any of that – it’s real life.

But a true live demo in class takes about 6 – 8 minutes. Students love them and are mesmerized as they watch. The reality is, that takes a lot of class time! When I pre-record, I get the perfect angle, with perfect lighting. But more importantly, for much of the quilting, I can double-time it. You still see the path and understand it…in half the time.

I’m using Shotcut and I took an excellent on-demand course from MJ Kinman. But there were a few things I missed and that was the problem. It took days to figure out, very frustrating days! Once I figured it out it was easy peasy, even for me! I think these videos will be very useful for my students, so it was time well spent.  And now I know how to edit video – me! Who’d a thunk that?

As a result, I have no pretty pictures for the week. I teach Doddle Quilting on Friday and wahooo, I’m a student in Margarita Korioth‘s class on Saturday and Sunday!! I’m pumped. I’m thinking next week’s post should be a fun read. Stay tuned.