Everyone got enough supplies to make two skulls. Suki taught the class and she is so great. There are two big tables in the classroom and everyone sat around talking and laughing while they stitched. It was a lot of fun.

Mom was so excited with her skulls that she decided to make a pumpkin when we got home. It turned out really cute.

Mom suggested making lots of small ornaments and having a Halloween tree. Sounds like a great idea to me! Collage also has a store on SE Woodstock now and they also do $5 Fridays. You can check out their class schedule on the link above. This coming Friday is Scrabble Tile Pendants. Sounds too good to pass up. See you there!

Basically what you do is bring water to a boil in a double boiler. Once the water boils, put the chocolate in the top and turn off the heat. Cover it and stir a few times. It only took about 5 – 10 minutes to melt. When the chocolate is totally, creamy melted, you carefully fill each mold. The chocolate is pretty dense so you could tap the mold on the counter to help the chocolate spread all the way out. Don’t overfill.

This is Susan filling the skull molds.

Me filling the mold with cats, owls and haunted houses.

Once you fill the molds, you put them in the freezer to set the chocolate. This didn’t take long either, maybe 10 – 20 minutes. I was surprised at how easy the process is. Somehow I thought it would take longer and be more complicated.

Heather has this edible gold powder that you brush on the candy after it is set. It gives the candies a bit of a sparkle and elegance.

Here is Susan and I looking pretty pleased with ourselves!

Here are some of the finished ones. The two color ones that you see on the left were futzy to do but looked really cool when they were done.

Many, many thanks to Heather for teaching us and for taking the pictures. You are a peach.

There were 12 students in the class and they brought the most amazing array of junk to work with. Michael gave great information about how to put stuff together so that it is structurelly sound. Lots of info about various glues, clays and caulks that will hold everything together.

Michael paints all of his pieces and I really didn’t realize how important that was until seeing how much it changed some of the other students work. The color really unifies the piece. Michael gave lots of info about various washes and combinations of colors that will give you a specific look. It was fascinating, especially to someone like me who gets nervous whenever you put a paintbrush in my hand.

Here are some of the students work and you can really see the difference between the painted ones and the yet to be painted ones.

This is mine, which is not finished. I’ve still got to paint it, add some eyes, maybe some decoration around the outside of the box. I’m just going to let it speak to me and tell me what it needs.  A big thank you  to Jen and Shawn. I used several of the bits that you gave me and they were crucial to the piece. Can’t wait to try another one.

The second project in the value workshop is a basket weave quilt. The aim is to have a light, medium and a dark that will give the finished piece a feeling of dimension. This hinges on getting enough contrast between said light, medium, and dark.

The third project from the value workshop is the hourglass blocks. Here we are looking for a light, a medium and a dark that we sew into strip sets and then cut into 90 degree triangles. The fun is in arranging them and seeing what happens. You can get all sorts of different movement and emphasis depending on how you arrange the blocks. I love this exercise. Being the third exercise of the day, the students are getting tired by this point! We really work hard in this workshop.

And to finish off this post, one of the students had taken my yin yang class years ago and brought in her finished quilt. It was just fabulous. I love seeing the results of classes. It’s such a joy.

But first I have to say what an incredible landscape is out there. The land opens up and becomes so vast. Coming from the forests here in Portland, I found it beautiful, although somewhat unnerving. Just miles and miles of wheat as far as you could see. After getting off the freeway, I drove about 50 miles and only saw about 8 cars.  And no cell service.

The value workshop was a lot of fun. I really enjoy teaching this class because the students get a lot out of it and leave with some good information to use in their future quilts. One of the exercises that we do is “trip around the world.”

These two pictures show Lise’s project with several different arrangements of the fabrics.

This is such a good visual on how a project changes depending on where you place your lights and darks.

Here are a couple of other projects from the class.

I’ll work on getting up some pictures of the other two projects. I was very pleased with what all the students accomplished. I really work them hard in this class and they rose to the challenge!

First of all, you have to use all synthetic fabrics, NO COTTON. That was really hard to do. Us quilters are usually such purists about fabrics. It was kind of fun to play with all the shiny, slippery stuff. So step one, you get a piece of felt, polyester of course. Then you start laying little pieces of shiny polyesters on top of it. When you’ve got those however you want them, you put a layer of some kind of sheer on top of that, netting , organza, whatever.

After you’ve got it all layered, you sew everything down on the sewing machine.

You end up with something like this:

Then you put your piece into an embroidery hoop and start burning between some of the stitching with a wood burning tool or a soldering iron. It was kind of scary at first but then I really enjoyed it. How often do you get to purposely burn things up?!

You end up with something that looks like this.

Vivienne was inspired by the work of Susan Lenz whose work she saw at a gallery in North Carolina. Viv bought a beautiful, large piece of Susan’s that hangs over her fireplace. It’s gorgeous. Here is a link to Susan’s explanation of how she makes her pieces.

It was a fun day. Thanks Viv.

These images are prepped for a xylene transfer. It will transfer only a black and white image.

These images were transfered using Citra-Solv and it is used to transfer color images.

These images were screened onto the fabric with fabric paint and the screens were made using a thermafax machine. Boy was this awesome. I’ve never screen printed before and I really loved this.

This last picture is mostly screen printed images as well as one that has metallic foil and one on the top left that is mono printed.

Wendy was a great teacher and I really learned a lot in this workshop. Well
worth taking if you should ever get the chance.

by Deborah Cagle

by Peggy Kelly

by Anne Matlak

by Ilsa Birmingham

We had a wonderful dinner with Mike, Earlene, Regina and Jeri. Good food, conversation and laughter.
The next day was the class. There were 19 students and everyone brought very different fabrics. We spent lots of time in the morning going through everyone’s pile and refining their two complementary fabric groups. By the end of the day, some great blocks were up on the wall. Here are a few samples.

And finally, many thanks to Earlene for hosting Vivienne and I. We both had a wonderful time with you and the guild and hope to come back next year. Happy Sewing!

The next two pictures are from the self portrait exercise. The first picture is by Susan Bucharest and the second picture is mine.

It was a wonderful two days and I think it will take me a while to digest all the information and learn to incorporate it into my work.