Classes and Classes

It has been a busy week with lots of bird sightings, a couple of classes and my daughter visiting and taking home her kitties (who I miss even though my husband brought down our kitties).

This is a picture of the beginning of Pat Mattison's class on some surface design techniques that she was teaching at the Crescent Moon Gallery in Wilmington.  They carry her beautiful quilts, her prints and her hand dyed scarves.

She had a full table of students set to dye some scarves with paints and Colorhue dyes.  Hope they bring some to club.

Yesterday, I took a fun class with Natalia Bonner (her website is Piece and Quilt).  The book that the quilt we did is called Modern Quilts and published by C & T.  These are her samples.  It is not an easy block!! It does give a cool diagonal look though.  Of course I decided to complicate it for myself as I can't imagine ever making any quilt that only had three colors in it (or even three fabrics with multiple colors). I played with the block a bit in Electric Quilt and then decided to only vary the colors of the crosses and keep the other two constant.

This was a striking example.

And so with this using the bright print.

Dianne really varied it by  using a large print as the background (I had considered this alternative but didn't have enough of a good background fabric).  Dianne's fabric was some she obtained when on assignment in Africa.

Here are my blocks so you can see what the block actually is.

This the class with their differet blocks.  Because I had decided to go scrappy, I couldn't sew mine together until I got home and got them on a design wall so I could make sure all the crosses aligned  I am on the far right in my favorite ice dyed t-shirt.  Natalia is the pretty young woman in the middle and she was just charming!!

These are my 24 squares sewn together and sewn rather poorly I must say.  They will go at the bottom of the quilt.  I have decided to increase the number of turquoise crosses and include a couple of more fabrics that have a little yellow with the purple and turquoise.  Unfortunately scrap quilts don't look really good until they are pretty good sized.  I don't know how much I want to commit but think I will make a good sized quilt as it really only took me about seven hours to get this much done.  I am thinking maybe 10 x 12 blocks or thereabouts.  The lattice is one of my hand dyes and is really the limiting factor here as I only  had a two yard piece.  I have a lot of the white though as it was a white on white fabric that I had brought down to dye in the class.