Class with Vikki Pignatelli

Our guest speaker and teacher this month at QBTS Guild was Vikki Pignatelli, an art quilter who is famous for her work with curves.  As the class was very affordable, I figured it was worth the two days.  Vikki was EXTREMELY generous with her knowledge and time and worked with everyone in the class.  It was the Improvisational Curves class that she was teaching.  The first day was basically learning her curves technique which was different from any that I had used before.  The second day was an incredible potpourri of techniques, many of which I could easily see using on jackets as they were embellishment techniques.  She also had a clever way of having nice bound holes in the middle of quilts which would add a lot of flexibility to you work as well as give it dimensionality.

The technique uses freezer paper as your pattern and a foundation stabilizer on which you pin your pieces.  I liked the idea of the stabilizer a lot but still not sure whether I will use the machine applique technique she uses.  Probably will adapt it somehow.

You can see some pleated (textured) pieces in this work.  It was a very cool idea which I liked a lot.  

This was Becky's piece which will eventually be a full blown tulip.  Loved the colors (my palette -- how could I not!).

This was Barbara's piece which was based on a watercolor she had done of a sunset over the ocean.

This piece shows a lot of inserts into the pleats that Vikki made as well as some yarn embellishment.  Can't you see this in clothing?

This was a display of all the different embellishment techniques which involve the making of "tubes" of cloth which are inserted into pleats.  The tubes can be straight up and down or mountainous like the piece on the top and the far left hand side of the bottom.  

.This was a piece that used larger tubes machine appliqued on top.

During our meeting, Vikki was of course our guest speaker and shared many quilts both in person and on slides.  Below are many of these.

 My favorite!

This was one of the quilts on the slides which I also really liked.

This was my favorite but on a slide so you can see the whole thing but the in person one was so much nicer!

An example of a log cabin type placement.

 

The one to the left is another log cabin while the one to the right is a tree but difficult to see because of the background.

Another one I just loved.

 This example uses pleating and the aforementioned tubes to get the texture.

Another one I loved.

This was clearly Vikki's favorite.

This was most of the class with their pieces after the second day.  The three on the far left are mine and you can see my grey hair peaking out over two of them -- I am sitting.  I didn't bring a sewing machine so just worked on the design and learning the technique of design.  We had a really good time and I met some very nice women in this guild which was very very nice!!  What a lovely group of women!!  Many of them were trying this kind of thing for the first time as this is primarily a more traditional group.  I think they will be trying more!!