Wednesday, April 25, 2012

Projects, and Paducah Webcasts

In between webcasts from Paducah, I decided to quilt "House of Wonky"
Very early this morning, I was trying to sign up for the webcast of Pat Sloan's lecture from the American Quilter's Society Show in Paducah, Kentucky...but I encountered a glitch. The ticket number wasn't working, so I called customer service at Clear Sky Webcasting and spoke with an agent named Jim.

After two unsuccessful attempts to resolve the issue, Jim decided to grant me full access to all the presentations in Paducah, just for my trouble. Wow!! How lucky am I?? It probably didn't hurt to tell him I just wanted to watch my friend Pat Sloan, who had me on her radio show last year. :) But I never expected him to give me a full-access pass. I was overwhelmed, and very thankful.

My block with peach, for Victoria Findlay Wolfe's color challenge
I've been working on appraisal reports all week, so it was nice to take a little time to watch the lectures. Last year, I was in Paducah, and the one thing I did outside the classes was go to visit Caryl Bryer Fallert in her studio, just a few blocks from the museum. I enjoyed chatting with her. When I told her about my art background and fear of trying to quilt, she immediately wanted to teach me how.

experimenting with different color quilting threads
Caryl, if you're out there reading this, it took me almost a year to muster up the courage, but I'm learning to quilt!! That's what I did in between the webcast lectures. All day I alternated between watching the lectures and playing on the sewing machine. I quilted "House of Wonky", did a peach color challenge block going along with Victoria Findlay Wolfe's weekly color challenge, and experimented with different colored threads on a small wholecloth batik quilt that I'm hoping will eventually be good enough to send to the Alzheimer's Art Quilt Initiative.  What a day, right?

It was great seeing Alex Anderson lecture again. I hadn't seen Pat lecture before, and she absolutely blew me away. I sent her a note to let her know how inspired I was, and how I'll be thinking about her as I prepare a lecture for next week. If I can do half as well as Pat did today, it'll be a huge success! Can't wait for tomorrow's lectures. All the webcasts are available at the time of the lecture, and on demand afterwards. So if you missed any of the lectures, you can still see it online. For more information visit the AQS web site.

5 comments:

  1. Love your quilts, Bill! Such freedom! Love it! Love it! It was Gwen Marston that set me free. I have admired this kind of quilting for years but had to take a class before I would actually try it. Keep up the good work.

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  2. I'll be binding House of Wonky while listening in on the webcasts from Paducah tomorrow. Then I get to have cocktails with Mary & Newman. Rough life!

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  3. I really like your 'House of Wonky' Bill. Awesome!

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  4. Are you quilting on your featherweight? A few years ago I got a darning foot for my FW and learned to adjust the tension (above instead of the regular machine where I drop the feeddog.) Anyway, it works and I had a lot of fun with it! Quilt on! (BTW, Paducah was fun this year. My friend Paula had a quilt in the show...first time for her...met lots of friends from around the country...next quilt trip is Lincoln AQSG.)

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    1. The ones I've quilted I did on the Featherweight, but with the things I'm working on right now, I think I'm going to work with long-arm quilters. What I need done is very simple, and no need for precision.

      Glad you had fun in Paducah. I missed being there, but it's one-event-a-year for this guy. It happens to be AQSG this year. It was funny last year in Paducah, meeting people I'd only known through the blog or Facebook. There's gonna be a lot of them in Lincoln. Hope everyone's wearing nametags!!

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