Today we had a gas at Maine-ly Sewing in Nobleboro, Maine. There were just two students in the class…

normally I don’t do classes that small, but since going to Houston is just around the corner and being able to pay for hotel and food is a good thing, I decided to give it a go. I’m SO glad I did! Elizabeth and Karen were my students, and what wonderful ones there were! Scroll all the way down to see more of their work!

I taught them a bunch of tricks and techniques. The hotlinks are mostly to Dick Blick, a website that I’ve used and this is reputable, that supplies artists and could be a serious Visa Accident waiting to happen. You have been warned! The techniques included:

*Fusing a chunk of Wonder Under (or whatever brand of fusible web) to the back of a chunk of fabric from which you then free-form cut shapes

*Fusing leftover bits and strips of fabric to a chunk of Wonder Under—like fitting together the pieces of a jigsaw puzzle. That way you can use all those too-large-to-toss, too-small to really use pieces of fabric. Keep the fused bits in a box or bag, and you have a ready-to-go stash of fusible for postcards and other small projects.

*making freezer paper stencils

*using freezer paper st encils with Shiva Paintstiks (regular and irridescent) or fabric paint (Jacquard, Lumiere and Setacolor Transparents today)

*doing rubbings over rubbing plates with the Paintstiks–I bought mine at Festival from Laura Murray, but she has a great online store, too…check this out for a direct link to the page with the rubbing plates on them, or start at her home page.

*playing with Angelina fibers

*leaf prints

Creating your own compositions, too, then stitching them, and finally couching (sewing) yarn to the edges to finish them instead of the typical quilt bindings or satin stitching! I’m glad we were few…don’t know how many students I could help well in this sort of class!

Elizabeth and Karen are both new to quilting, and they did FANTABULOUSLY well! Elizabeth wanted to do a picture (from memory!!!) of a saddle-back ridge near her home here in Maine. She also hunts, and brought with her some incredibly gorgeous Wood Duck feathers which she ended up using as trees on her postcard. Here she is during the composition phase:

The photos just don’t do her finished composition justice….angelina for the sunset sky, the hills and feathers….look at the colors in the first photo for a better idea of what they really look like.

Karen got many postcards begun…trying a bit of everything. She has three daughters, and wanted to send each one a card with a tree: one is angelina fibers, one is stenciled, one is a leaf-print! Then she took some leftover strips and fused them up into this wonderful abstract composition. Last weekend, she took my machine quilting class…her first time doing machine quilting…she is brand new and says “I don’t quilt.” Fiddle faddle! She’s a quilter NOW…this is great!

Also, at long last, I finally remembered to take pictures of the shop!!!! Tomorrow I’ll do a post about my favorite quilt store: Maine-ly Sewing!

The NEW class schedule is ready! In the coming months I’ll be teaching machine quilting, machine applique and my newest class, Fine Finishes. Learn how to make perfect bindings, then learn fun variations. If you would like me to teach a class to a group, drop me a line by replying to this message, or visiting the contact me page on my website. I’d love to set something up. And to find out why this quilt is up here, read to the bottom!

To register for a class, contact the store where it is held directly. Maine-ly Sewing is at 207-563-8445. Cote Brothers is at 782-5922:

2006:
Oct. 21–Postcard Workshop, Maine-ly Sewing, Nobleboro
Oct. 28–Machine Quilting, Cote Brothers, Auburn
Nov. 11–Janome Totebag, Maine-ly Sewing, Nobleboro
Nov. 18–More Machine Quilting with Decorative Threads,
Cote Brothers, Auburn
December 7 (Thursday)–Janome Totebag, Maine-ly Sewing, Nobleboro

2007:
January 20–Machine Applique, Maine-ly Sewing, Nobleboro
January 28 (Sunday)–Machine Quilting, Maine-ly Sewing, Nobleboro
February 4 (Sunday)–Janome Totebag, Maine-ly Sewing, Nobleboro
March 4 (Sunday)–Machine Quilting, Maine-ly Sewing, Nobleboro

I hope to add some classes at Cote Brothers in Spring…let me know what you’d like!

Also, some wonderful news. I’ll be published four times this fall! The Fall/Holiday Janome International Digest, available here will feature my totebag pattern. My quilt Autumn Borealis was included in the Exhibit Catalog for the Carrefour Europeen du Patchwork, known also as Val d’Argent, the big quilt show near Strasbourg, France, as one of four quilts from the “Changing the World One Thread at a Time” exhibit. I’ll scan the cover and the page with my quilt in a day or two to share with you all! Talk about a surprise!!!

The Tide is Hire, is a quilt that will be in the wonderful Viking Masterpieces exhibit in Houston, and will be in the show catalog “Imagine That.” I can’t wait until I can share it with you…in about three weeks! And last but definitely not least, I will have five journal quilts (!!!) in Karey Bresenhan’s new book Creative Quilting: the Journal Project Book., which can be pre-ordered here . WOW!

I guess hard work pays off {GRIN!}!

And to make the week complete (???), or at least a lot more fun, on Saturday evening, visitor 20,000 surfed in!

If you were on this site on Saturday evening, about 9:25 East coast time, from Berea (Berea College I think, on alltel.net), Kentucky, drop me a note via the reply feature (or through the comment page on my website) with your e-mail address. You’ve won a free pattern from my pattern page! I’ll write to you at your e-mail, and if you’ll share your snail mail address, I’ll send you the pattern of your choice.

This is a HUGE thanks to everyone who takes their time to surf in and visit my little blog. I cannot tell you how much joy I get looking at my sitemeter, seeing where folks are from, and how connected I can be with folks all over the world, most of whom I’ve never met except here in the ether.

Just for fun: here is where the 20 visitors just before and after the 20,000th visit have surfed in from:
Hahira, Georgia (the one in the US)
Cross River, NY
Berea, Kentucky
Melbourne, Victoria
Vendersheim, Rheinland-Pfalz, Germany
Newport Corner, Nova Scotia, Canada
Winkler, Manitoba, Canada
Victoria, British Colombia, Canada
The Colony, Texas
Rockland, Maine
Somewhere in the USA
Cambridge, Nova Scotia, Canada
Lisbon, Portugal
Friday Harbor, Washington
Irving, Texas
Rockland, Maine
(note…I think anyone who lives anywhere near me is logged as Rockland, instead of by town)
Another Rockland, Maine
Spanish Fork, Utah
Bruceton Mils, West Virginia
Brunswick, Maine

And in the next 80 (my sitemeter logs the most recent 100 visitors) folks from India, Egypt, France, the US, Canada, Australia, The Netherlands, the United Kingdom, and Sweden have visited…now how cool is that? REALLY COOL! Thanks!!!!!! Here:

{{{{{{{{{{{{{{{{blog-readers}}}}}}}}}}}}}}}}}}}}} that’s a cyber hug and thanks from me to you!

OK….before you all get ready to toss me in the cyber-wastebasket, I’ll share a few (ok…it got to be more than a few….) more photos from the ride, then switch back to something quilty, I think….. Here is a blue heron walking behind a beaver lodge!

We went down to the shore near the tent again and Paul and the boys found many, many starfish like this one (on Paul’s hand):

And Eli found the itty-bittiest starfish (or, to be more PC, “Seastar”) I’ve ever seen….yes, that little bitty thing on the tip of his not-so-very-big 8 year old fingertip is a seastar:

On the way to the tent I took a picture of this calcified kelp on top of a rock. No, I have no idea why I love the way it looks, I just do:

And no Maine series of pictures is good without rocks…I love the jaggedness combined with regularity in this heap pushing up out of the earth:

Sunset was spectacular again:

and then there was this cloud hovering over the horizon to the south that looked like a pteranosaur (for those who don’t have young sons into dinosaurs, those were the huge flying dinosaurs):

We had our last fire that night and used the last bit of wood we had with us…next time I’ll bring the tripod!

On Monday, before heading home to meet the chimney cleaners, we drove up to the top of Cadillac Mountain. It is not only the highest point on Mount Desert Island, but apparently the highest point on the Eastern seaboard. Here is a shot looking towards the mainland:

And here I LOVE the grooves left by the moving glaciers that carved out the rivers, peninsulas and bays of coastal Maine:

And a final, quintessentially Maine shot….of the lichen on the rocks, the berries waiting for winter, and the “barrens” of the high hills.

Now for the best photos of the weekend….the first coastal shot is from the Loop Road. Then we

parked near Eagle Lake and took a ride to Witch Pond….talk about glorious!

We stopped at the halfway point near something called (I think) Frenchman’s Bay…an overlook:

And rode by this pond on the way back to the car…all in all it was a 6.6 mile ride. It was pretty easy for everyone, except for Eli who was tired. He has ridden 10-11 miles (he’s 8 1/2) before, but was tired … probably because the nearly full moon was so bright that it kept waking us all up!

Near the 4 mile mark was a 3-arch bridge. The shapes were wonderful, and so were the photo ops!

Here’s one with a reflection of the bridge,

and a photo of leaves in a pool that remind me of something Andy Goldsworthy might begin to play with:

This is as many photos as I can get into apost (it’s a Blogger thing), so will add the last ones tomorrow.