I am joining the weekly To-Do Tuesday Linky Party hosted by Chris at ChrisKnits. 

To-Do for the week of Feb19th-22nd:

1. Get ready for and attend QuiltCon Together. 

To-Do #1

I took five workshops this past week at QuiltCon Together which was a virtual conference this year due to the pandemic. I had only signed up for four workshops when registration opened last June, but recently I added a fifth workshop because I wanted to learn needle-turned appliqué for a quilt I’m planning to make this Spring. I also attended four lectures.

Workshops:

1. Quilt Design with Yvonne Fuchs
2. Serendipity Blocks in EQ8 with Cheryl Brickey
3. Y-Seams Not Cry-Seams with Libs Elliott
4. Rainbow Sun with Sylvia Schaefer
5. Everyday Appliqué with Sarah Fielke

Lectures

1. Modern Scrappy Quilts Using Color Value with Blair Stocker
2. Secondary Designs and Beyond with Jen Carlton Bailly
3. Improv Through Many Eyes with Yvonne Fuchs, Chawne Kimber, Anne Sullivan, and Melanie Tuazon
4. Quilt Photography Overview with Julie Schoening

No doubt I signed up for A LOT! But it was more doable since I took Thursday and Friday off work, and by 6:00 am Thursday I was watching the video for Rainbow Sun. All of the workshops were on-demand, so that worked well with me being such an early bird. Sylvia has a great eye for color as is evident in the example piece she made for this Workshop. I decided that I would only watch the video and take notes and maybe next year I will make this amazing mini quilt referencing my notes and Sylvia’s book The Quilter’s Negative Space Handbook. It was fun watching Sylvia’s process as she selected her beautiful color gradient scraps.

The next workshop I accessed was Sarah Fielke’s appliqué class. She is a great teacher with a lovely Australian accent that I could listen to all day! Again I was a bit of a rebel and chose not to make the Class Project for which Sarah provided the templates. Instead I opted for a simpler design and cut out some orange peel pieces with my Accuquilt Die Cutter and then started appliquéing the orange peel pieces for a mini quilt for my office at work.

For Libs Elliott’s Y-Seams Not Cry Seams, I did complete the class project. I was happy to actually learn to use two specialty rulers I purchased awhile back: Hex N More and Super Sidekick both designed by Jaybird Quilts. I cut out a variety of white, grey, and black shapes in diamonds, triangles, and half-hexies and then I looked in my stash for a black print and came across a cool hexie print in the same colors as the shapes I’d just cut and decided to it had be in my class project. There was some time spent with my seam ripper when sewing the Y-seams, but overall it was a good skill to learn, and Libs Elliott is just super cool, so it was really fun to learn from her. I may quilt this project as is and turn it into a funky wall hanging.

Yvonne Fuchs’ Quilt Design class definitely challenged me in such a good way. I used a small gridded notebook to sketch some designs. The one below was to create a modern quilt/block using a source of inspiration I chose myself which was an offset snowball block. At first I thought I’d use black bars for the offset portion, but I didn’t like that, so I added one more pieced column. I also tried adding in a star block to see what that looked like. 

The last quilt design challenge for Yvonne’s class was to create our set of requirements and to create a quilt design based on those requirements. We were asked to consider what’s most important, second most important, and what can we be flexible about. I’ve decided that I want to play with curves using inspiration from Jen Carlton Bailly’s Secondary Design and Beyond lecture which was such a fun and entertaining presentation. I also want to use a limited palette of five colors that includes a dull color to allow my other four colors to shine. I’ve chosen my colors and ordered some fabric, and I plan to make some time in March to work on this project. I may squares to my curved pieces and possibly some HSTs.

The final workshop I took was Cheryl’s Serendipity Blocks in EQ8. Cheryl is a great teacher. I took a class from her at the EQ8 Academy in Ohio in 2019, and she uses the virtual format almost as well as in-person instruction. What really became clear to me is if I want to become more proficient in EQ8, I have to practice and use the program regularly. I have all sorts of resources, but I just need to use them on a consistent basis. See my To-Do list below to find out what I plan to do about this.

My favorite lecture was Julie Schoening’s Quilt Photography presentation. Julie posts on Instagram as @builtaquilt. She’s such a relaxed and  upbeat person with a wealth of information about photography. Hopefully you’ll see an improvement in my photos from watching this presentation. I do have two photos to share with you where I experimented with photo editing feature on my iPad. On Saturday I gave my friend, Kristen, the Cats & Birds quilt. I love how happy (and gloriously pregnant!) Kristen looks in the pic below:

Here’s a photo of the front of the quilt that I had to lighten up in photo editing.

QuiltCon Together Winners

There were many amazing quilts submitted for the QuiltCon Together Quilt Show. My favorite is Watercolor Study No. 6 by Audrey Esarey @cottonandbourbon. I hope to take her Virtual Watercolor online workshop someday.

To-Do for the week of Feb 23rd-March 1st:

1. Take Nicholas Ball’s Mosaic Tiles online workshop on Feb 27th through CraftyMonkies.
2. I started a 15-minute a day project on Monday where I will spend at least 15 minutes a day playing with EQ8. I’m not sure how long I will do this. I’d say at least a month and maybe for a 100 days—we’ll see. I’m not planning to post regularly on Instagram but will probably share some photos here on my blog.
3. Finish second Snowflake Embroidery Month 1 block.

Linking up to Chris Knits: To-Do Tuesday.