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.

So after seeing everyone else’s designs and hearing Jeanette’s comments, I went back to my table to work some more with paper until I could create a design that felt good enough to actually construct in fabric. Jeanette suggested that I look at the designs I already did and find the sections that I liked within those designs. That really helped and this is what I eventually came up with.

The last step of the process was to use tracing paper and create a quilting design that would enhance the piece. This part of the process was much more comfortable for me. I don’t know if you can see it very well but the quilting design I liked was topographical lines. I think they will look great and I’ll do them in a colored thread. Maybe red or lime green. I didn’t do this in class because I wanted to come home and do it on the long arm.

The class was really wonderful and Jeanette is a great teacher. She really has a way about her and has lots of great information to share.

By the end of the day, when we had a design that we liked in paper, we reproduced it in fabric. We did it twice, switching the position of the black and white so it was like a positive and negative of the same design. Here is mine.

There was a lot of interesting information about what feelings a simple line can evoke depending of whether it is thick or thin, vertical or horizontal, jagged or curving. It certainly gave me a lot to think about, especially since I use lines all the time in machine quilting. I mean, I think about lines a lot, just not in that terminology. Anyway, I’ll post all about the second day tomorrow. I’m really tired and off to bed.