Winter Leaves

Here is my latest creation. It is called Winter Leaves. I made it for the NY SAQA trunk show and for the SAQA auction that will be held later this year. It is 12" square.

I have a companion piece started but it may be a while before I get to work on it. I've be distracted with other things.

For the first time I got to join in the fun at one of our workshops. The instructor was Rosemary Eichorn, who I have always wanted to take a workshop from and never had the chance even though I use to live not that far from her in California. We collaged and played with tyvek, expanding paints, melting felt with a heat gun, and other cool stuff - like painting and melting potato chip bags!

Rosemary also showed us how to add piping on the edge and a facing finished border. Nice. I'm not quite finished with the piece that I created and as usual I'm not quite sure if I like at this moment. I think it needs something still.

Then the other distracting, but exciting news is that I am finally going to get to escape to a workshop myself! We had a free week in May and so I looking around the web just to see if perhaps a workshop that I'd like to take happened to be during that week and I found one -- Improvisations with Nancy Crow at her barn in OH! Yipeee! The class was full, but I put my name on the waiting list and crossed my fingers.

In the beginning of April I got an email from The Barn saying that the class was still full and would I like a refund of my deposit or did I want to wait and see if they got a last minute cancellation. What the heck, I told them to let it ride. So 2 weeks ago I got the good news! I got in! But now I had to face the reality of the infamous Supply List.

The first thing I did was post a query to the QuiltArt list about which was the best online fabric shop for quick and cheap stash building. The QuiltArt folk know everything! But, wow, I was totally overwhemed. Not only did I get a great bunch of suggestions for online shops, but a number of generous women actually sent me some fabric from their personal stash. Nancy Hinds, Sue Hill, Diane Pigg, Pam Morris -- Thank you so much! You're my heros.

The issue of course is that Nancy requires solid color fabrics and I rarely get such a thing. Below you see the entire extent of my solid fabric collection. I have some "near solids" but I know that Nancy frowns on that. Oh well, I'm taking my "non-solids" anyway, but I did just put in an order for some of the Kona solids. (I got mixed reviews on the quality of Kona solids, but as they were also the cheapest, I decided to get them anyway, as one person on quiltart wisely said, I'll be using them for class work and if they are cheap I won't be afraid to use them!)