Newfoundland Quilt Classes

I want to show you the projects I made in my Quilt Canada classes. I'm hoping to tell you all about that in the next couple of days, starting with the 2 day "Stitch a Flower Garden" class with Anne Morrell Robinson. The first day we looked at Anne's quilts and watched her demo how to use fusible stabilizers and create flower parts. Our goal was to practise making flowers, using the handouts, or the inspiring magazines and garden books that Anne brought.

I was surprised at the number of people who came with a complete plan in mind, including recreating garden photos and bringing commercial floral patterns that they wanted Anne to help them make. Some students planned to make vases, floral arrangements, and garden trellises or arches. I was completely blank - no plan, no ideas, basically no clue!!! But I just began in the way Anne instructed us, and these are some of my practise pieces, and trying to select a background fabric.

The first day was relaxing and fun since there was no pressure to work towards a masterpiece, only to make some possible flower components. Then we learned some techniques for making stems and leaves.

The second day was for growing your own unique garden made of the flower components from the first day. This is when it wasn't as fun anymore. I got really distracted by the growing gardens of the other students. First I was worried because most of the other garden backgrounds were dark, and mine was very light. Secondly I was starting to be concerned about the colours I had chosen which created a very colourful garden, that most of my classmates called "interesting"! Thirdly, the amazing quilter beside me was WAY ahead and was already machine quilting her finished garden, while I was still goofing around making flower components! It was a real insight into how students who lag behind might sometimes feel like giving up!! Here is Anne showing us how to machine quilt around the flowers, stems and leaves. Here is my project still trying to decide when there were enough flowers and leaves to move on to the fusing the flowers to the background stage.

I was amazed at how Anne could come around to each of the desks, look at a garden in progress and offer suggestions that always improved the composition.

On my lunch break the second day I realised that I didn't have big enough pieces of fabric for borders, so I quickly went to the merchant mall and my fellow student Isobelle helped me to pick some fabric. Here is the border fabric auditions. It seemed to take me forever to get the borders decided and sewn on.

Then I finally got to the sewing part. Here I am working on quilting the flowers down - notice I am not swearing, yelling or crying! The machine gave me/everyone fits to get started but eventually the thing cooperated and I got quilting. I just had time to do a little bit of sewing to make sure I understood the technique before it was clean up time. I wish I would have taken photos of the other projects, but apparently I was obsessed with my own project, and didn't notice that they other students had gone away!

Anyway, here is the project as I unpacked from my suitcase. It still needs a lot of quilting and I'm sure I will finish it since I still like it. In fact I like it a lot more than I did when I compared it to the other gardens in the class!!!