The last couple for this class

I can't wait to see these finished.

Another center

Center 2

Yay, we have another center done ;) and we still have 2 hours to go today.

First center of summer school 2

We are half way through the second summer school and lots of the students are now close to finishing their first pieces. I've finally done my second piece too ;)

Post FOQ recovery

I will post a bit about the show and my quilts tomorrow. but tonight I am glad to be home. Oddly I am now sad to have left my new friends and indeed some old ones. No you can't please me. I'm also missing the air con, the house it 31C. Too hot, far too hot.

Thank you so much to all the great people who helped me during the show. Especially to the lady who not only bought me an ice cream when I really needed one, but also carried my sewing machine and Greek Fossils to my car for me. You have no idea how much that meant to me. Really!

It was amazing to catch up with people I hadn't seen for a year or two. My little chicken stacker is going to Uni, how amazing is that? Will that mean she will lose her chicken stacking skills? There were lots of people there I had taught on courses and I lost track of how many had entered their quilts in various shows. I am so proud of you all, and I hope I will see more of your work out and about. After all without the quilters entering quilts the shows aren't much good are they :)

It's now way too hot for you to expect me to think, so I'm going to leave it here for tonight, except to say when I got home I had an email from the show giving me all the details of the awards ceremony. Doh! They tried, it's just a shame I wasn't home. They had reserved tables for us and everything, but I didn't get the message. Oddly it seems I hadn't put my mobile number on either. I must have been brain dead when I did that form, so apologies for saying they didn't contact me, they did.

Where am I?

I've been meaning to post this for years. I love this sculpture but everytime I forget. I hope you are impressed ;) This is the hotel I stay in ar the NEC, also known as I didn't have time to take any other pictures today. Ah dinner palls have arrived better go.

Dyeing.

This Monday was another private class. This time one of my students suggested a cfabric dyeing session in her home. That's brave but she isn't daft. Her house is having major building work done and she reasoned we couldn't trash it any more than thew builders ;) what a great attitude, and probably right. Of course when you demonstrate dyeing you end up with new fabric to play with, well after several hours of rinsing you do.

I was thrilled to find I had a shade of purple I've not had before. I am fairly sure now it is a water problem so we had used rainwater this time for all the dye. This should be softer than the local tap water. In fact quite a few of the coulours have come out different shades to normal, which I think is rather fun. It'sa left me wanting to travel around the country teaching dyeing. It would be an amazing way to collect different colours of fabric.

Most of my blacks this time are rather swampy, but I did get one run of 4 shades that look really promising. I also think I have a plan for the rainbow. They may be finding themselves in a quilt very very soon.

Machine quilting 1.5

These photos are from last Monday, sorry. I was down in Sussex teaching a class machine quilting. Most of the students had done some quilting before and thus asked for the technical information from Machine quilting 1 with the more advanced patterns. This is one of the really nice aspects of teaching small groups, being able to tailor the class to the students. It does help if one of the class has a nice big space for me to teach in, but of course there is nothing to stop individuals renting a hall so if you would like a private class with or without your friends get in touch. We will have a lot of fun and a lot of scope for customising the class.

Summer school

Now I've had a chancw to recover I thought it would be good to post some words about the summer school last week. This year Jenny decided to try something new over the summer when the Patchwork Corner workshop is usually unused. She thought she would try offering a more intensive five day course with food supplied so the students could concentrate on a project without worrying about anything else. We weren't sure if people would be interested but we tried the idea on some regular classes. The students were not only up for it, but they also knew what they wanted to do. Cool, saves me thinking of anything.

During the year students got increasingly excited. They had their books and were starting to come up with ideas for their own designs. Rather than running one 5 day course we realised we needed at least two to accomodate everyone. That was tricky. Between us there weren't that many options so the second course runs from a Sunday to a Thursday over the bank holiday at the end of August. Even so there is enough interest to run it.

Monday morning I arrived at the shop early only to find a couple of students had beaten me there. The lure of breakfast was strong. I was there by 9 every day from there in, even though the official start was 10am. After toast, fruit, pastries and yohgurt the students didn't seem too worried about actually getting down to work. Just as well I am a slave driver. A few had already designed their patterns and got straight on with printing their foundations but the rest needed to overcome their reservations about the dreaded D-word. I was so pleased when all of the got down top some serious playing. It's by far the best way to come up with a good mandala design. By lunchtime everyone has their framework organized, by the end of the day most students had all their foundations printed ready to start sewing.

Tuesday we had the breakfast idea sorted and were rewady to work by 10. Having the vatering area was reallt handy for teaching as we could all gather round one table. It was nice to have so much space to layout samples as well. For me Tuesday was quite hectic as I made sure everyone had their fabrics sorted and were getting on well with the foundaton piecing. It was also the time to make sure every foundation was pieced in the right order. Even though most of the students were doing really well with this, I didn't feel I could relax yet. If there were going to be problems this was the time.