I’ve been thinking about writing a Lessons Learned post ever since Afton launched this linky party. Still being fairly new to quilting (about 16 months), I learn lessons with every new project, but since I’m starting to digest my recent experience at QuiltCon, I thought this would be a great first Lessons Learned post.

My biggest lesson at QuiltCon is one I struggle with in my daily life, and that is that I often take on more than I can really effectively handle. I signed up for five workshops with three of them being evening workshops, and I am not a night person! I still learned and benefited from all of the workshops I took, but I didn’t get as much of a chance to meet and socialize with people as I might have, if I’d booked a slightly less busy schedule.

Kim Eichler-Messmer’s lecture on color theory was wonderful. I’ve been a little timid in my color experimentation, but Kim encouraged us several times to “Be bold. Be brave.” With Kim’s encouragement in mind, I found a vendor with a good selection of fabric and chose some fabrics out of my typical color palette to work together for Amy Smart’s fast strip-piecing workshop (because I’d brought fat quarters rather quarter-yard cuts of fabric). I really like how they look together except for the solid gold-yellow. I just noticed that you can only see a tiny spot of fuchsia pink on light grey fabric next to the solid fushcia fabric. It is Alison Glass’ Handcrafted Grove in Sidewalk that has splotches of fushcia and a corally-pink.

I had fun experimenting with different sizes of strips in Amy’s workshop with some of these fabrics.

My favorite talk was a free demo by Shea Henderson called Interfacing Intervention. Shea did such a great job of breaking down the best fusible interfacing for a variety of projects. It was cool when she brought out her book, School of Sewing, and I remembered it is on my book shelf at home. Now that I understand interfacing better, I really want to make Shea’s striped tote bag using an analogous color scheme (colors next to each other on the color wheel). See I’m already applying some of Kim’s color theory lecture to a future project!

My favorite workshop at QuiltCon was Jeni Baker’s Mastering the Half-Square Triangle. Jeni taught the traditional 2-at-a-time HST method, the 4-at-a-time technique for people who don’t like marking their squares, and my new favorite–the 8-at-a-time method. Jeni’s book, Patchwork Essentials: The Half-Square Triangle, reflects Jeni’s warm and approachable personality as well as her expertise. This past weekend, I chose four blocks from her book out of 60 sample blocks (with a slight variation or two) to make for my Terra Australis quilt, and I’ll be blogging about them this week, maybe even tomorrow for Building Blocks Tuesday.

Linking up to Quilting Mod: Lesson Learned.