Well folks, it’s that time again… time to share my teaching schedule for art quilting, applique and machine quilting classes! I’m thrilled to be able to travel more this year, and have longer teaching opportunities, including a four-day workshop—wheee!– in West Virginia in August!

Also, I feel awkward mentioning this, but will do it anyway: I would like to apply to teach for International Quilt Festival (Houston, Chicago and Long Beach). To do so, I need letters of recommendation from students and shop owners. If you would be willing to write a “to whom it may concern” letter and send to me to use, I would be most appreciative. Just let me know and I’ll send you my snail mail address. Thanks (she typed, blushing and squirming). Here goes:

2008

January 19 (tomorrow!), Intro to Machine Quilting at Quilt Divas in Rockland, Maine

January 26 (next Saturday), Intro to Machine Quilting at Maine-ly Sewing in Nobleboro, Maine

February 28 (a Thursday), Hawaiian Applique by Machine, Sarah Johnson Quilts in Belfast, Maine

April 23-26 (Wednesday to Saturday), the HUGE AQS Show in Paducah, Kentucky!!! I’ll be teaching: two machine quilting classes (one all day, one three-hour), a couple machine applique, intro drawing (and seeing!) for quilters — the ABC class I recently tested and blogged about, plus doing the All Star Review (demo-ing a technique) on Saturday afternoon… I’m hoping I haven’t lost my voice by then!

May 23-25, Salon 2008, Montreal, Quebec, Canada! I had to apply for a passport!!!! I’ll be teaching Machine Applique and Fabric Postcards; click here for class info; I’ll be teaching in English, but speak some very rusty French so may be able to help in French and “quilters sign language!”

August 7-9, Images Quilt Festival, Lowell, Massachusetts. I’ll be teaching Intro Machine Quilting, Decorative Stitch Applique and Hawaiian Applique by Machine. The class schedule is here.

August 17-22, Cedar Lakes Craft Center, Ripley, West Virginia. This will be my first time teaching a four-day workshop, and I’m so excited at the chance to work with students and really get deep into the subject! The workshop is titled: “The quilt top is done, now what?” It will be a compilation of my design and machine quilting classes. We’ll start with the “If you can write your ABC’s, you can draw,” move to designing your quilting designs (for hand or machine quilting) and how to draft and mark those designs, then machine quilting. I’ll be skipping the lecture portion of the day-long machine quilting class since the students here tend to be more experienced quilters and we’ll concentrate on fun nearly-no-mark quilting designs and using decorative threads. The 2007 catalog is here, and soon the 2008 catalog will be available (at the same web address I think).

November 15, Coastal Quilters Fiber Holiday Bazaar, Camden, Maine. I’ll have more info on location, etc., closer to the date, but I’ll be selling some small pieces of my work, patterns, and probably the Lark Books “Quilting with Beads” which features 8 designs by the Frayed Edges!

November 19th (Wednesday, TENTATIVE), BeadDesigners International, near Boston. I’ll be doing a lecture and possibly a workshop (the latter may be in spring 2009) about beading on fabric, my inspiration sources and trunk show.

2009!

March 18-19 (Wednesday and Thursday), 2009: Farmington Valley Quilters Guild, Connecticut! More details as we get closer. There will be a lecture on Wednesday and workshop Thursday. If you live somewhere within a few hours of here and would like me to teach before or after, let me know!

In three short months, I’ll be packing to head to my first MAJOR teaching venue: the AQS show in Paducah, Kentucky (it is amazing how quilters instantly know what you mean when you say Paducah, but mention it to the average soul on the street and you have to tell them it’s in Kentucky!). I will be teaching a whole bunch of things, including a class I had –until yesterday– never taught! EEEK! So the Coastal Quilters, my local guild chapter, came to the rescue. I offered to teach the class for free if they would be my guinea pigs…er…. ummm…. test-run for the class (picture above…but I blurred the faces because I forgot to ask each one for the OK to share pics)!

The class members were WONDERFUL, and I came away with several outstanding suggestions for improvements, learned that I needed to show how-to-steps on one project, and also decided I need to add one more exercise (meaning I have to delete something else) that pulls together everything we did in the class (and thanks to mulling it over with Roxanne by e-mail afterwards, have figured out how to do that!). All this is complicated by the fact that I function/teach better in a six hour format, and AQS prefers to offer 3 hour classes!

I started the class with a plug for a book that I consider nothing short of being able to work near miracles: The New Drawing on the Right Hand Side of the Brain and its companion workbook (in the picture), both by Betty Edwards–the two together cost less than US$ 24. I worked my way through the book with two friends, Linda C. and Lunnette H-H., when I lived on San Juan Island (before moving to Maine). We were all “OK” at drawing when we started (Lunnette was better than that, tho), but my gosh did I ever learn. Our before and after self-portraits showed dramatic improvement. I figure if *I* can learn on my own like that, anyone can. As a matter of fact, it was so useful I think I’ll do it again later this year. The titles above are hotlinked to the books at Amazon.com.

The class is called “If you can write your ABCs, You can draw”, and I started with a slide show… I need to improve the technical side of things, but as I showed more and more photos, all of a sudden I could see folks engage and start to “See.” As I told them, learning to draw is really about learning to SEE, then reproducing what you actually see (as opposed to what you think you see!). But, you don’t have to be Rembrandt…. you can use “aids.” some of these are the computer and your camera. To create “With These Hands,” I had my friend Marie take a few snaps of my hands…. I held them something like this:

Then I enlarged the photo on my computer, taped tracing paper to the screen (moving it as necessary) and traced the outlines and major contour lines (light, medium and dark areas). THEN I could transfer those lines to my cloth and create this:

One of the most fun exercises (and alas one which will be eliminated due to time constraints, at least from the 3 hour version of this class), was making paper snowflakes to learn to “draw” with scissors, and to look at the concept of negative space:

Then, a real keeper of an exercise is the “Expanded Square” from the book Notan: The Dark-Light Principle of Design by Marlys Mayfield and Dorr Bothwell (click on the title to see the book listed on Amazon–where it costs mere pennies…way worth it!). This exercise teaches you not only about negative space, but also about balance, rhythm, and possibilities of simple changes. In the book, the authors want you to use spendy black art paper to cut the shapes and glue it to white. Being thrifty (aka cheap) I had folks cut out of common white copy paper and glue it to black construction paper…it works! Here are Betty’s and Prudy’s being-glued examples:

And here are some of the class pieces:

I learned this week that a crafts center in Ripley, West Virginia, wants to hire me (?!!!!! WOOOOHOOO) to teach a 4-day workshop, so I think I’ll combine this class, my quilting design, a bit of machine quilting, and edge-finish classes into a “The top is done…what next?” class! Zippedy do DAH! In a couple days I’ll post my upcoming schedule of classes…. stay tuned! Cheers, Sarah the swamped

At long, LONG last, I’ve been able to make some headway on completing the last section of the manuscript for my book. Over the last few days of the boys’ vacation, I was able to complete a sampler quilt showing the effects of using different threads and different background quilting. I used the same wreath pattern on all eight “blocks”:

I used a matching 40-wt. trilobal polyester thread (shiny and beautiful like rayon, but stronger and more lightfast), Superior Threads Living Colors # , for the top row. I used a darker 40-wt. polyester thread for the wreaths in the second row, Superior Threads Nature Colors # . For the background I used Mettler 60-wt. “embroidery” cotton in a matching color, and in the bobbin I used Superior Threads The Bottom Line. If you click the photo above, it will open and enlarge.

As you can see from the overall shot, from a distance the matching color-thread quilting nearly disappears. The dark color stands out a lot, though, especially with the “pearl” circle in the center. If I were quilting a real quilt, I personally would choose something in the middle of these two colors. I think the reddish color is too strong, but the matching color doesn’t stand out (so why do all that hard work if no one can see it?!).

Here’s a picture of the quilt “in progress” under the sewing machine. As you can see, I used the easy-on-the-eyes blue marking pen (the thick one). If I had had the fine-point blue pen, I would have used it. The line on the Dritz wash-out pens is so thick (nearly 1/16th of an inch) you have to choose whether to quilt on one side of it, the other side of it, or aim for the middle!

The next part of the experiment was to illustrate how different background quilting blends in with or causes the main motif to pop out. From left to right (in both rows) I used:

• no background quilting
• cross-hatching (a grid) in a size similar to the large end of each feather in the wreath
• cross-hatching in a smaller scale
• stippling; on this one, I varied the size of the stippling. On the top row I used a fairly large stipple; on the bottom row I used a very small stipple to help the wreath stand out.

Between thee and me, I detest stippling most of the time. It has become SO overdone with the advent of machine quilting. There are lots more interesting ways to compress the background, but it does have its place (though infrequently!), and in this instance using a simple background quilting gets the point across better than something more creative.

Here’s a close-up of the no-background quilting blocks in the close up below…on the left. Boring and I think the background ripples some. I don’t personally care for this look, but certainly understand why some folks choose it, especially when hand quilting a big quilt!

On the right you see the cross-hatching in a similar scale as the wreath. By using contrasting lines (curved and straight), you get some differentiation between the motif and the background. Especially when looking at the block quilting in dark thread, it works.

When you reduce the scale of the cross-hatching, you get further contrast of scale as well as line. This really helps accentuate the motifs. In antique quilts, this is how they got those beautiful wreaths and feathers to stand out and be noticeable, even though they were usually using white thread on muslin. This photo will enlarge if you right-click and open it in a new window or tab.

In the stippling examples, boooorrrrriiiinnnngggggg, the larger stipple doesn’t do much AT ALL for me. The scale is too similar to the curves in the wreath. No significant contrast in line or scale. In the second block, the small scale of the stippling really helps “pop” the motif, as well as the small-scale cross-hatching. However, I still think there are lots more creative ways to deal with the background than boring old stippling. You can see the nearly-no-mark sampler I teach in my intro machine quilting classes here or here. That sort of background quilting is a LOT more fun (and visually interesting, at least to me!).

Finally, here’s a picture of the back. I used three fabrics on purpose to illustrate how the back looks when you have

• a solid (ish) fabric that matches the front
• a busy print
• a solid fabric that contrasts with the front

If you right click on this image, you can open it up larger to see more detail (I hope!).

I prefer to use a bobbin thread that matches the needle thread so that small variations in stitch tension and balance aren’t noticeable. Some quilters REALLY don’t like it when the bobbin thread contrasts with the backing. Personally, I really like the line-drawing appearance. As you can see from these photos, the bobbin thread is visible (but not very) on the matching solid, disappears completely on the busy circle print fabric in the center, and makes a nice picture (to me anyway) on the blue:
When I finish my Hawaiian-style jumbo 9-patch quilt, Nourish the Body, Nourish the Soul, I’ll share the background quilting on that and on a couple of my pattern quilts.

Aljo Dyes in NYC has the elusive (and expensive) Procion MX dye Blauviolett! Usually available only in Europe, this dye has a mystique built up around the color, which I had never seen. The color has been described as an unbelievable blue, not achieved through any other combination. Alas, it also has a reputation of fading hideously quickly. When I ordered it, Aljo also advised it has a much shorter shelf-life than the usual two years for procion mx dyes… it should be used in six months or less they said.

However, I got wind of the availability of this dye in the US for the first time in EONS, so I ordered a fairly small quantity (which I shared with some folks I met in Carol Soderlund’s dyeing classes) just to try. Through Paula Burch and Deb Harowitz of Scarlet Zebra, I learned that the dye might fade quickly on cotton, but that it seems to be MUCH more lightfast on silk. Hmmmm… so I not only dyed a fat quarter of cotton, but several different types of silk (I also finally broke out the citric acid crystals to use instead of the soda ash, which can have a negative effect on the hand and sheen or silk). The photo above shows cotton, silk jacquard (which appears not to be pure silk), sandwashed silk (from Dharma), and a silk chiffon, plus some silk rattail cord (also from Dharma). Here’s what they look like pinned to my design wall–

top row L to R: Sandwashed silk, mercerized cotton,

bottom row L to R: silk (and something) jacquard, silk dupioni, silk rattail cord, silk chiffon:

ALL fabrics were dyed with the same concentration of dye stock–all the silks were batched in the same container which you can see — the round tub on the bottom right! As you can see clearly, the chiffon and the silk portion of the jacquard “took” the dye very deeply, the dupioni and sandwashed silk (heavenly on the hands!) is less intense, and the cotton is lightest of all.

Now that the holidays are behind us, I am planning to cut two swatches of the cotton and the silks. One set of swatches will go inside an envelope and be tucked away inside a drawer or inside a book–thoroughly protected from exposure to any light. The other set of swatches I’ll tape to the inside of my window. Then, if I can actually manage to do this, every month (hopefully regularly, like on the first) I’ll take side-by-side photos to document fading due to light exposure.

Here’s a close-up of the cotton…sigh. Sad to think that in three months this will probably be a dingy purplish pale gray…….

If the silk remains light fast, I’ll buy up some silk and use up the rest of the dye… stay tuned!

Can you tell I love snow? And taking pictures… here, some more winter inspiration, starting with the tree in the cemetary (not that you can tell with all that snow), Mt. Battie in the background:

Here’s the Village Green:

And the Harbor, from in front of the library:

I love the “dinosaur ridges” on the tree branches (near our house):

The reflections in the not-yet-frozen run-off creek near the house:

Eli playing in the snow with ‘Widgeon:

and Joshua playing in the snow, too:

And the snow at least a foot deep blanketing my studio over the garage:

The snow-bound creek (which will freeze over before too long):

And the laden pine boughs alongside the driveway: