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You can find Part 2 here. I will write next week about the experience, teaching and the wonderful people I met! Well it was a fabulous show! Yes, I think it was smaller than last year, but still, there were many stunning quilts. The surprise for me this year was that the Abstract category was huge and the Modern comparatively small. There were some strong exhibits that intrigued me and I was especially taken by an exhibit by Teresa Duryea Wong which featured rescued tops that she finished. A woman who stood right behind me at that exhibit remarked:…
It’s that time of year where I am in the final countdown to Houston. I literally walk around the house muttering to myself. I might be packing supplies for my ruler work class and suddenly remember I need to bring the “odd charger” for my speaker and Square thingy. I will run and get that while I remember it, and then go back to the original task. On and on it goes. Each year holds a prep surprise. You never know where it’s gonna come from, how long it will take to resolve and when it will show up.…
I have written about this fairly diminutive piece in no less than SIX previous posts , here, here, here, here, here, and here! Three of those posts were about that dog gone border. I began this piece in a Barbara Blanton Appliquick class with my guild. It is a fairly complicated block for a 6 hr workshop and quite frankly, I doubted I would ever finish; it was just too much work. But life intervened and I NEEDED some hand work, so I idly began to work it bit by bit. Then I got into it and LOVED the block.…
NOTE: There will be no blog post next week as I will be traveling. See you on Oct 17th! After that, one more post before Houston and another break. Will you miss me? This will be a short post – I am going to be out of town for a few days and I just have not had time to do much. Maybe all my readers have figured out that I am never going to finish my applique/trapunto piece. I think this is my fifth post on my little ole 33″ square piece. Oy. Last week I showed all my…
The applique/trapunto project continues to grow and ask me for more, not letting the simple or “git er done” to prevail. So here’s what she asked me to do this week: I wanted to feather that border, it needed something that justified the central block: Ah, she asked for feathers, but not just regular feathers. She asked for something a little different. I thought it might be cool to do those feathers in red: Meh. How about if I put a vein in each feather? That was a hard “no”! How about a lighter blue? Hmm, maybe a little…
I completed nothing this week except creating and editing teaching videos to support my 3 hour Straight Line Ruler Work class. Ruler work on a domestic is pretty difficult to show live. You kinda need 3 hands and it’s hard to not block the camera with your hands. Other teachers will not be surprised with this statistic: it took 10 hrs to tape and edit 7 videos with a total play time of 31 minutes. They will debut this Saturday at an online class and I suspect I will skip some of what I’ve recorded. One of the great…
This was a fun one! My Grandson is learning his alphabet and one of my students, Traci, practiced her free motion quilting by making quilted letters for her Grandson. I totally, 100% got the idea from Traci; thank you! I started out by just using batting between two layers of fabric, but I thought that might be a little floppy. I grabbed some Fast2Fuse from my stash for the middle layer instead. Fast2Fuse was designed for mailable postcards and is a 2-sided stiff fusible, perfect for the letters! This is a documentary, not a tutorial! There are probably better…
It’s been a super busy week but there are not that many photos to share. My son prefers that no photos of children be posted online; you know how people can do bad things with them. But I do have a few photos to share. We had the most wonderful get together; it was a short 2 days, but oh so fun! This was baby M’s first longer car trip, 2 hours. She did well in the car and seemed to thrive here at the house too. She truly is an adorable girl, wish I could show you! Baby hands…
What a faaaaaantastic week I’ve had (if you go Th to Th)! I had 18 talented, eager, prepared, well equipped and enthusiastic students for a 2-day Seminar at Meissner Sewing‘s main location in Sacramento. I billed it as a beginner’s class, but about half of the students had experience, several of them quite talented already. That was a challenge and it all worked out beautifully. It is such a joy to teach a class like this, when everyone is excited! I hope you can see that joy on their faces. I seem to always forget to take as many…
NOTE: I won’t have a newsletter this week; I just realized there is no way I can do it; I will be teaching all day Fri and Sat. Sorry! I had a chance to work on my applique/trapunto piece this week and all I want to do is quilt it! I chose a luscious navy blue dupioni for the border, a striped silk for the insert and a traditional ecru fabric for the half square triangles. It came together beautifully: I chose to do a “bouncing banana” fill around the applique. My other choices were micro stipple or bubble.…