QuiltCon 2019 :: The Classes

Not yet officially home from QuiltCon due to a side-trip to visit family in western Tennessee, I'm sneaking onto the blog to share just a bit about my time at QuiltCon. Know this: it is overwhelming, exciting, affirming, challenging, enlightening, fulfilling.... and so much more. This was my third QuiltCon and it was as great an experience as ever. If you have access to Instagram, I tagged all my related posts there with #aqtquiltcon2019, so you'll at least get a glimpse.

I took just two classes this year. First was an evening one: Planned and Unplanned: Find Your Improv Groove with Melanie Tuazon [melintheattic]. Maybe it was because I'd had an exhausting first day of QuiltCon, but I'm thinking evening classes are more energy than I want to exert in the future. But that said, it was a really good class. Melanie is an excellent teacher, and I really appreciated her planned/unplanned approach to improv. If you're an MQG member, look for her webinar on Planned and Unplanned to explore the concept in more detail. It's kind of how I work anyway, but it's a thoughtful way to approach inprov, and I hope to consider it more intentionally in my future work.

We were to choose a simple block to focus our sewing time on, and I selected an X with a bar top and bottom, similar to a Roman numeral ten. Beings it was only a three-hour class, that didn't leave much room for exploration, so I basically played with scale, and best of all, randomly met my online-friend Carolina! We shared a common introductory QuiltCon conversation, Debbie: "Hi! I think we follow each other on Instagram!" "Yes! We're friends!" replied Carolina. Yup. Only now we've met face to face, which was really wonderful!

I've been known to choose a class purely on who's teaching it, and that was totally the case for my second, all-day class, Improv Theme & Variation with Denyse Schmidt. I lucked out and got to sit and sew next to my Bee Sewcial mates Leanne and Marci, which added to the fun of the day.

Gotta say, meeting Denyse and listening to her talk about modern quilting and improv crossed one off my bucket list. It was surreal spending the day in class with her, and I said so when we were each asked why we took the class/what we wanted to get out of it. Just being and sewing was enough for me!

Again, we began with a traditional block whittled down to its simplest form. I chose the quarter log-cabin block, and worked with a stack of stash oranges and blues. No rulers allowed, by the way!

After making a bunch of blocks, we were to put them up on our design walls.

Leave it to Denyse to come along and mix things up a bit!

If anything, Denyse emphasized scaling up, and we all agreed it totally made a difference. Here's how far I got. I'll see when I get home how I feel about sewing it right up as is or adding to it.

In both classes, teachers left time for all of us to share what we'd done, get feedback, etc. which was really great. I was so glad to see Marci had snapped the shot below of Denyse listening to me explain what I had done in class!

So that's it for the QuiltCon sharing for now. Still plenty more to come as I 'unpack' all the experiences!