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Hard at Work

You know sometimes all you want to do is sew and boy, have I done that.  Taking Improvisational

Piecing with Veronica Hofman-Ortega at John C. Campbell's Folk School was one of my better ideas.  I love a class that starts with design exercises that will lead into bigger and better ideas.  Not to mention the ladies in my class were great!  There was a full range of quilters in the class  - from the very experienced to the beginner.  All were traditional, so this was pushing pretty much everyone out of their comfort zone.  But let me ...

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Okay, show of hands, who out there gives a small groan when you get the supply list for a big quilting class?  25 years later and many, many 5-day quilting classes and I still get intiminadated when I first read the list.  You think to yourself, "Self!  Does she really want us to bring all this stuff?  Are we really going to use all of it? And how much fabric is actually enough?"  I mean nobody wants to get to class and think, "Gosh I wish I had  "insert the most perfect fabric here" with me."  But also you don ...

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Dorothea Lange, Seeing People Exhibit

 Okay so here is this week's tip....don't think you can take a quick 2-day trip to Washington DC and not come home exhausted and your mind a big creative blur.  We only saw 2 museums, The National Gallery and the National Museum of American History and it still was stimuli overload. It wasn't just the museums which were amazing in themselves, but also the whole National Mall area.  We took the metro in from Arlington, VA, and popped up in the Federal Triangle station which is the middle of 10 ...

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Dorothy's Lange

This week finds me traveling to Washington DC to visit the National Gallery.  We love the National

Dorothea Lange, Formerly enslaved woman, Alabama, 1938

Mall since we are kinda museum junkies.  But we haven't been back since 2019 due to the dreaded plague.  I keep an eye on the National Gallery's webpage and discovered that they are running a Dorothea Lange exhibit through March.  So Paul is indulging me with a quick trip down to see it as well as the Mark Rothko exhibit and Masters of American Furniture, the Kaufman Collection (see a little ...

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So it's getting to be that time again...the time when I start thinking of next year's quilt class/workshop/vacation.  Every year I start the hunt for where do I want to go and what do I want to learn.  In the beginning, it was so much easier....I never had been anywhere and I didn't know anything, so it was all new.  I remember picking Paula Nadelstern for my first class, not because I actually thought I would learn to make quilts like she did (which I did not) but because I just wanted to ...

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By Gretchen VanNostrand

Contrary to how last week's post read, I really did have a good time on my creative vacation.  I try to do at least one week a year to recharge my batteries and this week surely did.  It wasn't that the piece really lead me to new ideas, but more the people that surrounded me were a pleasure.

One of which was Gretchen VanNostrand of West Virginia.  Gretchen has been quilting for about 20 years, but she specializes in fabric bags and organizers.  So she walked into the class never really having tried anything like ...

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Our Classroom at Marc Adams School of Woodworking and Time Honor Crafts

Okay, let me start by saying, this is not this clown's first rodeo.  When I get ready for a 5-day design class, I normally have a plan in mind of how it's going to go.  This week with Timna Tarr's Stitched Mosaic was no different.  Since I took this exact same class last year, I thought no problem.  You pick a pretty picture - you edit - you place fabrics - you sew - you get your pretty picture in fabric.  Right?

Well, apparently not.

It started off pretty ...

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 After much angst,  I did manage to come up with a photo for my upcoming Timna Tarr's Stitched Mosiac class.  Good thing too since it starts on Monday morning!  I did do a lot of research, but ultimately I took the easy way out and bought a picture from IStock.  

Points that lead to this choice

1. It has the same joyful theme that Tessa's Mosaic does so it will form a series
2. The color palettes will be similar
3. No faces to obsess about
4. Hands that I know how to do
5. Landscape orientation

You see, somewhere in my research ...

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Monday, May 1st was my 30th wedding anniversary.  It seems like a big milestone, right?  Really, though I don't think of it that way.  Every day with my husband has been a blessing and I'm just glad it all turned out the way I thought it was going to back in 1993.  

Every year we try to do something together that is a little different.  This year we made a day trip to go down to Pittsburgh to revisit the Carnegie Museum of Art.  The last time we were there was 2006ish and so much has changed.  The ...

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We got home Saturday night at 1am from a 6 day trip to Illinois and Indiana.  It was our first time crossing the border to the US since before the pandemic.  My quilting friend, Christine, and her husband came with us. The original inspiration for the trip was an advertisement I saw online for a display of Ken Burns' antique quilts at the Peoria Riverfront Museum in Illinois...I told my husband that it would be interesting to see this exhibit and the vacation grew out of this small seed that I planted! We spent a few hours at the ...

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Hello! Today I’m stopping by to share my best 10 Tips for Quilt Retreats. I wrote a post about this several years ago and decided it was time for an update. I’m also sharing a printable with some of my best tips, and I have links to a couple of great packing supply lists too! […]

The post 10 Tips for Quilt Retreats appeared first on A Quilting Life.

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This is why we asked Will for more tables!

 Is anybody surprised that a week after getting home, not only am I just feeling normal again but my
studio is not unpacked?  Gosh!!  There it all sits in the middle of the room just waiting to get back to its proper place.  It really was a great class....exhausting...but great.  After spending 2 years isolating it was so odd to be around people for most of the day!

Back in the early 90s, Marc Adams had the vision to start a woodworking school in the middle of a cornfield ...

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Blacksmith Shop, John C. Campbell's Folk School

 

As my class date draws closer, it's got me thinking about how travel always seems to inspire my creative nature.  (Obviously, since we have traveled very little in the last two years and I feel all dried up inside.) It's the trips and the classes over the years that have been a driving force in keeping me sewing.  There is always something new to learn, places to explore, and people to meet.  

But right now I just have one little trip planned for this summer and it's located smack ...

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Can you believe I've been active online since 1998?  I've been writing this blog since June 2009.  22 years online....geesh... Honestly, I don't know where the time goes.  I knew the internet  was going to be a game-changer on how we communicate but really not nearly to what extent.  I remember learning how to communicate in my first chat room, joining my first online quilt group, making my first cyber best friend (Julia in AK by way of Nebraska).  I joined quilt block exchanges, millennial charm exchanges, round robins.  If it had to do with quilting ...

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Jennifer Reis stitching her latest piece

First of all, I want to apologize for taking a break from blogging.  I've have been having some health issues this summer which I think are finally behind me!  Still they didn't stop me from making the 11 hour trip to John C. Campbell Folk School.  After getting cancelled out of two - YES TWO! - classes in 2020, I wasn't going to miss this year.

This time, I was lucky enough to snag a spot in Jennifer Reis' Embellishment class.  We spent the week first learning (or refreshing) all sorts of hand ...

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Our family, including our daughter and Finn, spent the last week at a cottage up north.  We passed our days sitting on the dock or the screened porch, reading, doing a puzzle, going for walks and I also did some knitting.  I brought my new embroidery kit with me as well as a couple of knitting projects, but I did not even open the embroidery kit.  I was more in the mood to knit. The screened porch was the perfect place to knit--a nice breeze off the lake and no mosquitoes!

I was quite happy,  knitting away, and managed to ...

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My favorite thing to do during the fall is take a road trip.  The leaves  are at peak color and the air is crisp.  This year getting out of Erie for a bit was especially important since we never get out of Erie any more!  So I dragged my husband on a day trip to Zink's Fabric Outlet  and Lehman's Hardware in the Amish Country of Central Ohio.  Both are about 2.5 hrs from our house and it was a gorgeous day for a drive.

Zink's Outlet was on top of my bucket lists of places ...

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I finished the cross stitching on the bee this week and moved on to the wreath of flowers and hearts around the bee.  There is still some backstitching to do as well, but I will do that once I am done with the cross stitching.  I have not done any counted cross stitch in a while and I am enjoying this little project. 

In the knitting department, I finished the sheep baby washcloth and started a starfish cloth.  I am accumulating a pile of baby wash cloths to use as gifts when babies come along. The starfish cloth is actually ...

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This week I got an interesting letter from Nancy Hinds.  She will be my teacher during my upcoming vacation at John C. Campbell Folk School.  Last year was my first time there with me learning how to paint silk.  Although the class was great, I realized that all I wanted to do on my vacation was have a low maintenance pretty environment, eat well and sew.  So this year I chose to take the class that would do just that called.. Playful Piecing.  From the description, I knew that it would be lose enough for me to play ...

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