Exciting Events

Philippa Naylor, author of Quilting in the Limelight, was here for a week after Quilt Market.  We played, we shopped, we saw the Annie Liebovitz show, we ate and saw Skyfall and had a fun, fun time! The reason she was in town was to lecture and teach two classes for a local guild.

Her lecture was the Life of a Quilter and it was so very interesting and very humorous!  It took you through her entire life and showed all the other creative aspects such as cake decorating, casket decorating and her fancy costumes for herself, husband and two sons. Everyone enjoyed hearing all the stories of her life!

Here are the two quilts that she brought to show. In the Tumbling Blocks quilt on the right, there are dozens of custom 3-D blocks protruding from the quilt…all of them are free-motion quilted and all are different sizes and irregular shapes.

Isn’t this amazing!?  But it didn’t win anything in Houston this year and that’s wild to me!

Philippa taught Precision Piecing and then Finishing Techniques which I took.

The classes were full and everyone felt that they learned a lot and they had a great time!  I learned something very useful in turning points and making them very sharp, as in collars of shirts and know I’ll be adding that to my repertoire for years. I’ve said it many times and I’ll say it here again, if you ever have a chance to take a class from Philippa or go to her lecture, you will LOVE her!

Incidentally, I just put her book on sale this week so take advantage of that!

EVENT#2 I lectured for our local SAQA (Studio Art Quilt Associates) group this weekend.  They asked me to talk about my observations of the judging for the Quilt National show and I thought they would like to hear about it.

Well, it was held at Nancy Crow’s barn in Baltimore, OH which was an exciting location!  Nancy and her husband John, took this beautiful timber frame barn and made it a retreat center for Nancy and other guests to teach classes and it is phenomenal!

Downstairs there is an area with this huge sink for wet work and dyeing with huge tables to lay out your fabric.  Then next to that is an area for dry work, printmaking and such with huge working area.

Upstairs is usually where the sewing happens with large tables for each student and high ceilings with pinboards all around.  We used one area for our lecture and discussions and sharing.

The kitchen area is filled with light and a great meeting area with everything you need for a party with indoor and outdoor seating.  We had a potluck lunch and Nancy made apple dumplings.  The kitchen is decorated with baskets and spoons that she collected from Africa and even some mobiles of baskets from the ceiling!  All this handcrafted cabinetry and beautiful sycamore floors!

I basically talked about watching the judges select the 85 quilts for the Quilt National 2013 show as in two previous blogs but also tried to give them some more info and make it a conversation.  They stopped me at parts and asked questions and that is what I like. There were some heated parts when others disagreed with the policies but I don’t make policy at QN, just an observer.

The funny part was at the sharing when many showed their beautiful quilts and said it was a QN reject.  I showed them photos of other works of art that were rejected also. It doesn’t mean that the work is not world class…it just means that there is a finite number of quilts selected to fit into the barn space and that they should keep on trying!