Wednesday, February 20, 2008

quiltyness baskets


Nonsense title, I know. Here they are from the book I love (Collabarative Quilting) I had a great class with Freddy Moran last week- the rumors are true: she is writting another book with Gwen Marston. This is the quilt we were making:No surprise, I'm having a wee little bit of a problem with following a pattern, and so I think my girls are going to go in a row by row setting, where there is a row of one kind of block followed by a row of another kind of block. I have been free piecing fruits and vegetables to that end.

The class was a revelation for me, and not just because I've never taken a quilting class before. Quilters are not like knitters. Quilters need jello shots, in a bad way. People kept say, seriously, that this was really hard for them, not because they didn't have great skills, but because it was all too free, too bright, too much color.
"should we use a quarter inch seam ?"
"If you want to"
you'd have thought that Ms Moran had advised that they eat a raw chicken.

I was getting along pretty nice with one quilter who was seated at the same power strip ( another difference: knitters rarely need to plug anything in.) and it was going great until she felt the need to witness her faith, at which point I remembered that I should not get friendly with people wearing massive crucifixes around their necks. They are mostly not ironic about the Jesus guy. MMmmm, good times for the agnostic Jew.

After that cheerful exchange I pretty much stuck to my sewing. I got a lot of blocks done, comparatively, and Miss Elna 1958 behaved herself. I wish I could gush over the shop it was held in, but I can't so I won't. Still have the class with Ms Moan and Ms Marston to look forward to next month. I'll be bringing jello shots, but I'll probably have to eat them all myself.

2 comments:

Tonya Ricucci said...

sounds like you managed to have a whole lot of anal retentives in your class. Guess I shouldn't be surprised since that seems to be the way almost every book, magazine, class ever teaches. sigh. so much for creativity and fun. I can't follow directions either - much better to learn how to do something new and then adapt it to suit yourself and make your own quilt.

maybe they could hold the class in a mexican food restaurant - Margaritas!

good news about the book. woohoo!

kt said...

I can totally relate to the jello shot comment. while I do enjoy the straight laced traditional patterns, I love using not as traditional color schemes with them. I did a class with sandy bonsib and made essentially a square in a square with [gasp!] flannels in [double gasp!] neon! I even had it judged in a few local fairs and it never really did that well, even though the sewing was solid and the points were decent. just a bunch of old fuddy duddies if you ask me.

I've been going through a quilting slump lately... and my previous mantra was "if a man riding by on horseback can't see it, then it's fine." well, due to some bloggerly advice... it's been changed to "if you can't notice the mistake after 1 margarita, then it's fine." perhaps we should adjust again to say... after 1 jello shot! :D

*kt