Saturday, August 21, 2010

friday workday


my mom has had wednesday workday for years - a day each week to quilt with her friend, trish. it has actually been on thursday for the past several years, but i still think of it as wednesday workday. the alliteration is nice.

a couple of months ago, when my sister, beth, and i were talking about maybe taking a quilt class together, trish and my mom came up with the much better idea of them teaching us to quilt instead. they are very experienced quilters, have learned a lot through the years, are great company, and volunteered to come to us, so of course, we took them up on the offer. friday was the best day for all of us to do it together and so, every other friday, we will be having our own friday workday.

the fabric i picked out for my sampler
we are going to be making a sampler quilt with them, one that allows us to learn several different quilting skills, depending on the square. about a month ago, we all went and picked out fabric together. this is quite the process for me (an oddity, given my generally decisive nature) and i finally came up with a group of fabrics that i really like. the fabric pictured at the beginning of the post is my focus fabric for the quilt.

cutting some strips of fabric
yesterday was our first workday. trish and my mom gave us tips on how to iron and press fabric (yes, they are two different things), showed us the ropes on cutting fabric, and then we calibrated our sewing with the machines we will be using to make sure that we are sewing a 1/4" seam. we also did a lot of chatting. we're good at that.

my fellow student
after our lesson, my mom pulled out a notebook and gave us our homework assignment: cutting out fabric for three squares (fence rail, log cabin, and nine patch) and sewing one of them. it's like i'm in school again. but much more fun.

i'll keep you updated on my school work.

2 comments:

audrey said...

I'm so jealous. I wish I could join you. I love the picture of your "feature" fabric. It's just beautiful.

R said...

How fun! I need to do something like that too!