Class with Cynthia Corbin

My impetus for going to the NC Quilt Symposium was to get a feel for the kind of quilting I would find down there. I belong to a very active guild and art quilt group here in Rochester and want to make sure I can duplicate the experience down in NC for future reference! A nice treat was that I was able to take another class with Cynthia Corbin who is a tremendous artist and heck of a nice lady besides. She is able to gently move you in new directions without pushing you to do Cynthia Corbin quilts. We did a lot of critiquing in the class, all of it very helpful.

I had a very limited pallette (I had NO space in my car driving down so had to skimp on the fabric). Basically I had two gradations -- one of greys and one of red to brown and several random pieces of hand dyed fabrics in miscellaneous colors (whatever I picked up). So I ended up doing my studies using just shades of grey. This is definitely not my pallette so was very challenging. Add to that, forgetting my cutting mat at my daughter's the first day so I had to hand cut everything..... So I just played with grey studies the first day in very geometric shapes (no curves). They were okay and useful. The second day, not being able to stand not having any curves I took a random piece of cranberry colored fabric and added tree shapes into the greys.

This was the beginning of a piece by Patti. She cut up her image that she first made.

This was a couple of iterations later but still not quite pulled together although she had cut up all her smaller compositions.

This was my very first piece after just slashing lines. The goal was to show contrast between each individual section. Told you I had a limited pallette!

Here I have cut into it three times already and need to do more to break up the large sections.

I then went into the shades of grey trying different combinations hoping to get something I liked! I had redone the original drawing by now so there are more lines as well.

This was another classmates first day's projects. She ended up with a very nice horizontal piece at the end of the second day.

These were the many sketches that classmate Diane accomplished within the first hour! She definitely would be a candidate for Iron Quilter as she was fast and accurate!

Here are most of my trees from the second day. I need to do a couple of more to have them facing in a different direction! I also moved from a horizontal to a vertical format. In the first one in the upper right I used a template I had created separately from the piece. It didn't work well. The rest I just cut into and was influenced by the lines already there so that was definitely a better direction.

This was another student's piece cut apart and reordered with the addition of the purple. It was interesting to watch her progress as she tested fabric after fabric for where the purple is. The purple was by far the most successful!

This was another student's first piece (upper right) and then the modified piece below which she then used different fabrics to produce the four square quilt. Lovely luscious browns.

It was interesting to follow Lise's work as well. She felt she had created a boat in her first piece so she split it up and used very dramatic fabrics which worked very well.

This was Patti's final piece pulled together with the black and white with circles fabric.