The Ricky Tims Quilt Seminar

Gail and I spend Thursday, Friday and Saturday at the Ricky Tims Quilt Seminar.  It was held at the Rochester Institute of Technology in their wonderful fieldhouse.  These seminars are held throughout the country as well as occasionally overseas and include Ricky Tims, Libby Lehman and Alex Anderson (who formerly hosted Simply Quilts).  They presented three days of lectures and Ricky performed in concert on Friday night -- his formal training was as a musician.  All I can say is, if  you get the chance, don't pass up the opportunity to attend one of these.  I consider myself to be a fairly sophisticated quilter but I was inspired especially by Ricky and Libby who had tons of tips and techniques to share!  It was just plain fun as there was a lot of bantering and easygoing camaraderie among the three presenters.  There was a bit or marketing but it wasn't at all annoying.

Here are John Anderson and Alex and Ricky at the beginning of the seminar.  Ricky and Alex share a a website called The Quilt Show which features full length quilt shows with many of the famous quilters.   They are also publishing a magazine called Quilt Life.  This is a publication from AQS.

Priscilla Kibbee and Maryanne Smith were the two people in our Club who organized this event with the Ricky Tims organization who gave the club a hefty donation as this was the largest seminar they have produced to date.  We even had 140 people come down from Canada.  I even met a very, very distant cousin (family name but she was aware of the family history) which was fun.  She was a Coffin -- the Coffins were one of the founding families on Nantucket.

Priscilla and Marcia were very, very busy during these three days. Marcia was assigned as Ricky's follower which meant she had to be the line monitor for autographs and also the official event photographer using his camera.  The hand dyed aprons were one of the perks of being a volunteer.

Here is Marcia with Ricky in front of one of Ricky's quilts!

Alex had many of her books for sale and was happily autographing them for visitors.  Marty Grasberger was one of the helpers at her table.

My sister posing with Ricky at the table where he and Libby were doing autographs and pictures!  Ricky lives about a hour south of where my sister lives in Colorado Springs and she often hikes down in his area.

Bernina is a sponsor of the seminar and here Libby is working with Ricky showing him some of the features of a new machine that was premiered at this event -- Priscilla already has ordered one and it is the first machine that has tempted me in the last 13 years!

Libby was a sketch!!  I had her many years ago for a class and already knew what a nice friendly down to earth person she was!

The following are four of Ricky's quilts. The second one was a joint effort between Ricky and his father. His father did the lone star in the center with fabrics that Ricky dyed and picked out for him and Ricky did the rest using his applique technique.  Almost all of the quilts in the show were illustrating a technique that Alex, Libby and Ricky demonstrated including designing, machine quilting, hand quilting, applique technique and caveman piecing.


We all got to take home a book which further detailed all the techniques that were demonstrated so that we didn't have to take notes!

Ricky is a gifted musician and we really enjoyed his concert where he shared many of his family stories and pictures from his background. We especially enjoyed the compositions that he had written himself. I would have bought one of his cds except the lines were so long!!!

My sister yelled down to Alex for her to look up which she obligingly did and Gail snapped this shot!

This is just one of the many, many piles of Ricky's hand dyed fabrics.  People were just scooping them up and filling their bags -- you could run a tab!

Here Marcia Birken is clowning with Alex's husband John!!

Gail and I were there for the set up in the morning and this picture was taken immediately after all the carefully hung quilts came crashing down like dominoes.  Eventually we got some weights to hold the stands in place but for awhile all capable hands were holding poles while the quilts were rehung.