home again

It's amazing how quickly the week went and how much fun it was. The second part of the week was a free-spirited workshop where everybody worked at her own pace. Here I am with Roberta Chalfy Miller, who took a class with me in January. She is almost finished with a gorgeous piece she worked on in studio next door and then in my classroom on Friday. I won't post a picture just in case she wants to enter it in a major national show. I was delighted to see her again. She also generously contributed a bag of found objects for printing that she schlepped all the way from the west coast of Florida. Thanks, Roberta! My students had fun with them. Linda Lasco, auctioneer extraordinaire (she was fantastic at Friday night's scholarship auction), came with a bunch of leftover scraps from other projects and ended up with what turned out to be house blocks, albeit unintended. It just evolved, as did the piece below, which she created without advance planning. Diane is cutting random strips and will eventually have a piece made with her collection of gorgeous African fabrics. Lori made free-form blocks from the fabrics she had printed earlier in the week -- and this fragment will go into her first art quilt. Ruth took some ugly fabric earlier in the week and made it into a beauty with her printing. Below, you can see her audition of fabrics as she decides what will work with it. She ended up with something she is pleased with and will finish at home. In fact, she made several small pieces from her own fabrics during the week. I am glad to be home, but I am doing laundry and it is back to reality. There is something magical about being away at a place like Quilting by the Lake: the spirit, the camaraderie, and the generosity of students and teachers make you want to go back again and again. The auction of wonderful gift baskets and the aprons we teachers decorated was a huge success and will provide scholarships for students who want to attend next year's QBL and otherwise would not be able to do so. I couldn't resist posting this sign, which was in the dining room on the busing table. Everybody was so offended by the grammar that we kept stealing the signs. Eventually, somebody got the idea and corrected the spelling. This is a detail of the Helene Davis shirt I bought at the mini-mall on Tuesday night. I am wearing it now -- it feels so delicious that I just asked Helene to send me 2 or 3 more of her gorgeous shirts in whatever colors/patterns she chooses. Yum yum. That's all for tonight. Great week and I'm ready to head to the studio tomorrow!