Class with Mary Lou!

I had lots of fun taking class with Mary Lou!! And I picked up some good tips......with the most important one being about what Mary Lou calls "light giver" fabrics. These are fabrics which contain light, medium, and dark values all within one print. They help draw your eye into a quilt and give it some zing!

This print is a good example of a light giver.....

Mary Lou also talked about using a variety of prints....dots, stripes, plaids, tone on tone, large scale, etc to create interest within the quilt. Good to know I have been on the right track all these years!

The goal of the class was to begin making a self portrait. Mary Lou starts with the borders NOT the quilt center when she makes a quilt. So that's where we started too.

Now I have a hard time following directions sometimes.......a real hard time. So Mary Lou wanted us to start off making a wonky churn dash block for our border. But I have always loved her flower borders and reallllllly wanted to have a flower border for my quilt.

So I asked her if it was ok for me to make a flower instead.....and she said yes!!!

She suggested starting with an easy flower......so I picked out some scraps.

And added the background fabrics........my background is a purple polka dot print.

And my flowers were born.

The technique for making these is really loose. It's alot of free cutting and then fitting it all together like a jig saw puzzle. After I made these I had to make my favorite flower......the cone flower!!

I had so much fun making it......gonna make lots more of these in a variety of colors. That's another thing Mary Lou mentioned, that you don't have to have your colors true to the real thing. Hmmmm, maybe some green cone flowers!

I made a whole bunch of flowers in two days.

See.....

I made a little bird too......he's really cute. Might make some more of those.....

Then I worked on my game plan for the quilt center. The first thing to do was make a list of 30 things about the "star" of the quilt. Since I'm the star, I had to write about myself.

Then you narrow the list down to the 6 things you think are most important. Mary Lou said you always end up adding some more as the work progresses so leave some space.

Then you  make a sketch.......here's mine.

I really struggled to figure out how to make a sitting on the ground me. Those legs gave me a tough time. So I asked Mary Lou for some help......

She's really good at drawing!!!  I'm going to make the kids sit down and try sketching them so I can get better.

I have alot more flowers to make before I get to the quilt center, so I have time to refine my sketch and practice drawing more.

Tuesday is class with Bonnie Hunter and then a retreat this coming weekend. These past two weeks have been a festival of quilty stuff!!

Loving it!!!!

Have a great day!!

kathy