Weekend with Bonnie Hunter

Spent all day Friday and Saturday sewing with Bonnie Hunter who did 2 workshops for the Quilter's Guild of Dallas.  It was a lot of fun!  Bonnie is great; she's a good teacher and very helpful.  She has an incredible color sense which I'm not sure she realizes how special it is.  I think she just 'does it", but it is a gift, I think. 

We spent the days sewing and rocking to the Beach Boys channel on Pandora.  Do take a workshop with Bonnie if you can; I've never had 2 days pass so fast except for maybe the shop hop I went on (details below).

These are the quilts we were working on:

Friday's quilt - Jamestown Landing from "String Fling"

 

 

Saturday's quilt - Virginia Bound from "Scraps and Shirttails":

 

I will post pictures of my blocks soon.

 

But the big news is I cleaned up my studio.  Hurray!!

 

 

 

Actually, you can see a couple of my blocks for the Virginia Bound quilt on the table.  The room is full, but it is straightened up and ready for major quilting to happen!

 

Strangely, what took the longest was framing the FQ signed by Tula Pink.  It's up on the wall behind the TV.  I met Tula when I participated in  a 3 day shop hop in September, 2011.  There were 12 buses of women circulating for those three days in North Texas, Oklahoma, Missouri and Kansas.  Tula's mother organized the trip; at the time she owned a great quilt store in Missouri.  I bought a bunch of fabric designed by Tula and she signed on of the FQ's.  I could put it in a quilt, but decided to frame it instead.

 

If you ever get an opportunity to go on a 3 day bus trip to 12 quilt stores, do it!  It was unbelievably fun.  The North Texas shop that participated was the Quilt Asylum.  Great memories!

 

What do you think of my clean studio??

 

 

 

 

 

 

Back to Work

After my long break it's time to get going and get back to work!

First things first - my studio is a bit of a mess:

It's hard to sew when everything is strewn about...

 

OK.  So I signed up for four classes three weekends in a row.  Is this normal?  Plus I took a jacket class in July - you can see the red fabric by the sewing machine and the special Pellon fabric (photographing as white on the cutting table) you use to make patterns and can sew up to make a pattern that fits. 

You can also see the fat quarters and other fabric out of blue and beige I'm going to use for one of Bonnie Hunter's classes with the Dallas Quilt Guild Sept 6th. 

You can also see two bolts of fabric I snagged at the new quilt shop in Plano, 'The Texas Quilter' in May.  They are part of Sue Zipkin's Sweet Shoppe collection which was from a few years ago, but they match my dishes.  I'm going to cover the chairs in my breakfast room and make curtains!

But everything doesn't need to be out all at once.  So I need to clean this up and then I can get back to work!

Thinking about it, I KNOW I'm not the only soul with a messy studio!  Who else out there will admit to it?

I'll be posting photos of the great clean-up within the next week!