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

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

1. Take Nicholas Ball’s Mosaic Tiles online workshop. √ Done
2. Spend at least 15 minutes a day playing with EQ8. √ Done
3. Finish second Snowflake Embroidery Month 1 block. √ Done

To-Do #1

I really enjoyed Nicholas Ball’s Mosaic Tiles online workshop through Crafty Monkies. The host of this virtual class was Rachel Pierman, and she is the founder of Crafty Monkies. She has a great sense of humor, and Nicholas is a fantastic instructor. Behind him in the photo below is a class example of his improv Mosaic Tiles. Notice that there is a definitely a wonky factor with many of the colorful “tiles” in the fabric mosaic.

Nicholas shared a few different ways to make a mosaic tiles piece. The first option is much more regimented with right angles and consistent grout widths, which is the option I chose for my class project. Moving further along the improv spectrum is a version with far fewer right angles such as Nicholas’ class example. He then demonstrated how use this technique with improv curves (see below):

The last option Nicholas shared with us is cutting stacks of fabric using using a variety of angles and then reordering the pieces. This is one technique that can be used in the Kintsugi quilt featured in Nicholas’ book Inspiring Improv. I absolutely want to make one some day.

I did start my Mosaic Tiles class project during the live Zoom workshop. But I prefer to watch online presentations closely and take a lot of screen shots as well as written notes before I try to apply all the information shared. I decided to use the Whale Tales fabric collection that I used in the Meadowland quilt for my nephew and thought a non-wonky version would work best to showcase some of the fussy cut squares in my class project that I was able to finish up the next day.

I really do recommend Nicholas’ classes, and I want to try some other Crafty Monkies classes down the road. The classes are broadcast from the United Kingdom, so you need to make sure their time zone works for you. Today’s class was held 4:00-7:00 pm (GMT) which was 9:00 am-12:00 pm in New Mexico (and would’ve started at 11:00 am for those of you on the East Coast). The cost was about $48 for the three-hour class.

To-Do #2

EQ8 already makes more sense to me since I’ve spent several hours this past week playing with the program. I committed to 15 minutes a day but put in at least a half hour each day this past week. I made it through several lessons in EQ8 Lessons for Beginners, and then I created an EQ8 rendition of the quilt I designed last weekend on graph paper in Yvonne Fuch’s Quilt Design workshop at QuiltCon Together. 

To-Do #3

I sure am having fun stitching along with the Snowflake Embroidery BOM. Below is the second block for Month 1 with a lovely snowflake design:

To-Do for the week of March 2nd-8th:

1. Work on my March 2020 OMG project.
2. Quilt my Mosaic Tiles class project.
3. Make a few more Shoal fish.
4. Start my Snowflake Embroidery Month 2 block.
5. Continue spending at least 15 minutes a day playing with EQ8. 

Linking up to Chris Knits: To-Do Tuesday.