A Class with Susan Brubaker Knapp

Project #11

I’ve known Susan for a few years so I was thrilled to have her come to my guild to teach a class!  Right from the airport we went to see the orchids and butterflies at the Franklin Park conservatory.

Followed by lunch at the North Market, Vietnamese for me and Indian for her; a quick trip to the Antiques store and the costume jewelry store before a stop at my house and then Greek dinner before her lecture at guild.

Saturday I took her November Leaves class, even though it is March.  This was so much fun! I didn’t know what to expect, just signed up. We painted tyvek with rubber sponge brushes, cut out leaves and arranged them on our quilt sandwich. If all your leaves were the same color then you could trade with someone and that’s what I did.

Next with free-motion, which I am trying to get better at doing, I stitched around the outside perimeter of the leaves and then stitched in the veins.

Then came the FUN part where we took an iron and MELTED the tyvek so that the backing fabric was showing. You can’t control it. You just hold the iron until you like what is happening. It only takes a few seconds. Wherever you stitched, the tyvek will stay but the open areas will ‘shrink’ away. You could end up with skeleton leaves.

Then I did some free motion of the leaves in the background. I didn’t want to fill it in completely with free motion because I like the ‘ghost’ leaves and wanted them to show. Also, I didn’t want to screw this up since I’m a novice free-motion stitcher!

The Lumiere paint by Jacquard is one of my favorites because it looks luminescent when dry and this paint dries quickly which is nice.

I looked at Philippa Naylor’s new book, Applique Mastery to see how she finishes the back of her small quilts. This is 17” square.  And the finished quilt will actually hang somewhere in my house! I have none of my own work on my walls.

I’m happy with it and it was a fun class! Susan is a charming teacher and a natural. Very easy and lots of good information. I encourage you to take a class with her or watch her on Quilting Arts TV!

Now I want to take more classes. Learn lots of new techniques to have in my quilting arsenal!  I encourage everyone to take classes. I’m even taking some gourmet cooking classes now, which has delicious endings!

We just finished 11 weeks of the year and so I’ve been very productive so far!