Last Friday I had the pleasure of taking a quilting class with Jenny Lyon. I have been quilting on my home machine for a while, but this was my first class with a real teacher, not an online class.
The class was advertised with this sampler. I signed up and hoped for good instruction.
Jenny is a delightful teacher, very informative. Our first design, basic swirl, or squiggle. Now I know, working on a 15″ square of fabric isn’t hard, but she had good tips on how to get this design ‘right’.
A little bigger is a little better.
Two views of the meander, same piece, different angle, and lighting. There is a method to this, it isn’t random. This is a very traditional filler. During the class, Jenny spoke about how to handle a large quilt. That is the rub, that is where all the issues arise, on a large project. Well, I’ll have to try some of her suggestions and I need to realize that it’s going to be slow and hard, wrangling a large quilt. There is no magic solution.
The ever popular pebbles. A very tedious design that looks great. Jenny had some good tips, and yet…
…the best advice is doing be too ambitious with pebbles. Use them sparingly. They take up too much time, thread and effort.
This scallop pattern is great. Jenny calls it ‘charity quilt background’ because it looks complicated. It is relatively easy and is great to cover a whole charity quilt with. Most people who quilt charity quilts want it to look good but not be labor intensive. This fits the bill. It would also make a good background on selective areas of any quilt.
As you can see, we did each of the designs in the sampler, but we never put them all together in one project. The class was billed as an introduction class. Turns out all of us had some kind of experience, so we moved along quickly from one design to another.
So much so, we even got a quick feather tutorial. Now I’m quite good at feathers, I use them in most of my quilts. Experience is really a great teacher. And yet, Jenny had some good tips to share.
Once the class was over, I put the machine in its traveling case and went home. Only to discover that on the drive home, the machine must have tipped over and the pre-tension disks broke! ARRRRGH. So it was off to the shop with the machine. I fear a long wait for some missing part. More on that latter.
Leah