AAQ Retreats -- Highlights and Dates for 2010

Sometime during each retreat week, Alex and I get together to share thoughts about what we might teach the next year. We listen to what is going on in the industry and the types of questions that people ask us so that we can tailor our breakout sessions to what our quilters really want to know.

There have been a lot of questions on how to handle curves and circles. There are some interesting presser feet and other tools on the market to handle these tricky piecing situations, so we're going to play with them this year and bring them to class in 2010.

Alex showed this quilt, based on the Drunkard's Path block, as a possible project for next year. Our first session people reacted enthusiastically, so this will be the project for those retreaters who want to work on it.

Our dates next year will be:

Session I: Thursday, October 14 - Sunday, October 17

Session II: Sunday, October 17 - Wednesday, October 20

As usual, there will be a period of time where the current attendees will have priority for registration. They will receive an e-mail from Susan Moore with the registration form. After that is over, registration will be open to the wait list and anyone else who wishes to attend.

Keep an eye on the blog and on Alex's AAQ Retreat website for further information on when general registration will begin. As usual, we will have a lot of fun! Alex and I will each teach a curved or circle piecing segment and we will both be on tap all day, each day, to answer your questions and help you bring your quilting ideas to reality.

I think the best thing about the retreat is that Alex and I are so different and come from such different quilting backgrounds. Both of us started with piecing, applique and quilting; Alex's skills started with handwork, mine were honed on the sewing machine. So between the two of us we have a deep breadth of knowledge of quilting techniques and can pretty much answer any question that comes up.

Hope to see you there in October!

AAQ Retreats, Livermore CA (Session 1, Day 3)

Every year I watch people arrive with piles of fabric and a bunch of good ideas. They shop for more fabric, discuss their ideas with their fellow retreaters, ask Alex and me questions, and sew and sew and sew. I showed some pictures yesterday of what some people were starting to work on and took these pictures this afternoon so you can see all the progress that was made.

People who come here can work on anything they want, although there is always an optional project that relates to whatever Alex and I are teaching. This year's project is Alex's pattern "Holiday Lights Updated!", which worked perfectly with her isoceles triangle lesson. Above are the two quilts on the cover of Alex's pattern.

My quilt using this triangle shape is called "Aboriginal Dance" and differs in that my triangles are pieced before the side pieces are added to the triangle to form the rectangular block.

Here are some of the other tree projects as of early this evening:

Jean and Karen were both working on red trees and backgrounds; I can't honestly say which trees belong to which sewer because they were both on the same design board for a while and then somebody moved! Unfortunately, when that move was made, my brain didn't make the transition...

Those are Carol's blue and white trees on the left and Sylvia's plaid trees on the right. What I liked about everybody's trees was the wide variety of fabrics used to make the blocks look so different.



Sue's pink trees on varied grey backgrounds was striking and really different.

Diane's was unique in that she used one background fabric for all of the blocks, but a lot of different shades of green for the trees. When I took this picture, she was trying to decide on a fabric to applique the cord that strings the tree lights in the border.

There were quite a few people who weren't working on the trees, but had brought plenty of other things to have fun with...

Erica pieced a kit called "Midnight Dreams" from Sew Batik. It finishes 56"x68" and when I commented on how pretty the fabrics were, Erica told me that it was all actually one fabric that has many different designs printed on it. The one fabric is cut into strips according to the directions to get all the different batik prints that you see in the quilt.


Sheila's log cabin.....

Linda's small and complex projects. If you compare this to yesterday's blog post, you can see that the star is a bit larger and that she added the little bitty house and tree quilt to her design board. When she was showing this quilt, she was referring to "big trees" and "little trees", but I for the life of me can't see a big tree in there!!

Sharon Garcia from our lovely state of Hawaii was sewing nearby and wrote down a Hawaiian name for Linda: it is "Ka loea humupuali'i , which means "the expert quilter of intricate beauty". Yep, sure looks like she deserves it!

Mel made lots of aprons, which we all fell in love with, and a little Christmas quilt. I'll be posting the Show & Share quilts next week and Mel showed a couple of embellished quilts that were absolutely to die for -- a lady of many artistic talents!



Judy is a newcomer to AAQ Retreat and she was working on this red/white/black quilt top. I believe that it is called bento boxes, but wouldn't swear to that....

Dawna got all of her basket blocks sewn, sashed and the setting and corner triangles cut and ready to go. As fast as she sews, it wouldn't be a surprise if she had at least one border on before she leaves tomorrow.

My next post will have a couple of announcements about next year's retreats and then I'll be ready to start photographing Session II tomorrow afternoon!

AAQ Retreats, Livermore CA (Session 1, Day 2)

Today was our second day of retreat and, especially fun for me, my birthday! So at brunch, the group gave me flowers and a card and sang the birthday song. I had already loaded up this morning on all the good birthday wishes sent my way on Facebook -- thanks, everybody!

We usually start around 9 and do our breakout sessions around 9:30. Alex's session was today so I snuck to the side of the room and took a couple of pictures.

To the left is Alex being serious -- she's holding her hands pretty far apart for isoceles triangle instruction, don't you think?

Below, after the magic words, "Look up!" That's Karen from Greenville SC also looking up with a big smile....

Carolie Hensley sets up a mini-store at the retreat where sewers can buy fabrics, needles, thread, gifts and all sorts of goodies they may have either left at home or not realized they needed. Two packs of note cards just threw themselves off the table into my hands as I walked by the table -- had to buy 'em!

Carolie owns The Cotton Patch in Lafayette CA; it's definitely worth a trip to see all the fabrics, the quilts on the walls, the gifts, the gadgets, the books (she is also a major force -- the "C" -- in C&T Publishing) and the large classroom where it seems there is a workshop going on just about every day. I was on C&T's website today and noticed that there is also a blog that looks like fun to read. To get to the blog, click here.

In the classroom today, there seemed to be a whole design wall devoted to baskets. The ones on the left were made by Joyce, who wasn't able to quite sneak out of the picture, and her daughter-in-law, Julie.

The blue basket block (I'm sort of cheating with this picture because I took it early in the day; she had at least five by the end of the afternoon) was pieced by Dawna, one of my best friends and the owner, with her sister Fay, of Bolts in the Bathtub in Lancaster CA.

If you missed my previous post on their shop, click here.

A lot of us drifted over to this side of the room when Danelle put this up on the wall. Each block is the same pattern, made of a lot of small pieces and then rotated before sewing the blocks together so that all those seams don't have to be matched. What really makes this quilt, in my opinion, is the beautiful, rich autumn fabrics. I could see this as a pieced background for applique or embroidery....

The retreats are basically independent study with both Alex and me on tap, but each year there are a couple of techniques taught and some people work with that. Alex taught this tree block this morning and here are a couple of interpretations:

Red tree/black & white background? Black and white tree/red background? Decisions, decisions.....why not both?

In the blocks below, Cindy chose black and white backgrounds with a number of different shades of green for her trees.

While taking pictures, I was distracted by this spool of variegated thread from Aurifil on one of the machines. I didn't know Aurifil made variegated -- so it's either new or I've not been paying enough attention....




And, in this corner, we have stars! Sheila is making the red/black/white star quilt for her daughter, Caitlin.

If this were the Olympics, Linda would get extra credit for difficulty level -- you know, like gymnasts! She always has the smallest and greatest number of pieces in any given project....

There will be a lot more blocks on those design boards tomorrow!

AAQ Retreats, Livermore CA (Session 1, Day 1)

We had a little bit of rain in the forecast this morning -- in the desert, if it says we have a 20% chance, we get really excited -- so I was thinking that I might see some rain on the drive up to Livermore. All of us who come to retreat remember the years where it poured; it seemed like it was always just as we were either arriving or departing, so we knew we were going to get soaked either loading or unloading the car!

Today I lucked out, hitting rain on Interstate 5 (our main north/south artery; Californians just call it "the 5") just north of Bakersfield. It rained for about 100 miles and then the sun broke through somewhere between Harris Ranch (a yummy restaurant, especially if you like beef) and the town of Santa Nella. A quick nip into Starbucks in Westley and then I was ready to get to the Hilton Garden Inn.

Almost all of the people who join us here have come for at least three years and we have several who have come for all nine years since Alex started the retreats in 2001. We had two new people join us this session and it was fun meeting them and widening our circle of friends.

Alex always does a trunk show the first evening; my job is to hold up the other side of the quilt and to occasionally provide commentary if I have done the quilting. Tonight's main topic was applique, with other subjects touched on as we talked about what we might do next year....

Alex has a new book out from C&T Publishing called "Alex Anderson's Hand and Machine Applique", so a number of these quilts are from this book. This one was fun to quilt -- all ice cream cones and a very fun fabric in the border. I have done a lot of machine quilting for Alex over the years, so instead of telling you that I have quilted something, I'll tell you if I didn't....

One of the things I have always loved about Alex's quilts is the way she puts fabrics and colors together -- I wish I had that talent! I'm sure this has a better name -- in my notes, I scribbled "swags & flowers"....

This is a smaller quilt with fun leaves and flowers appliqued on a "piano key" pieced border.

A couple of smaller quilts; I did not quilt these and I believe they were appliqued by hand.



I've always really liked this one -- of course, it's PINK! The combination of piecing and applique really work well together and there is feather quilting in the border.

Each year Alex and I each teach a 1-2 hour class in a hand or machine technique.

Here are two quilts featuring the isoceles triangle shape that Alex will be teaching in her breakout session tomorrow. There were a few groans when she said she was starting at 9:30 -- someone said, "In the morning?"

I don't think I quilted either of these....

Alex and I have already been discussing what we will teach next year and she decided on "curves and circles". She showed this quilt where she used her pieced circles technique in the "body" of the quilt and another curved piecing technique to set in the "squiggles" in the border.

This is the quilt that Alex made for her son Joey and his wife Shelley to celebrate their wedding. She uses her pieced "squiggles" along with some piecing of both small and large squares that is embellished with embroidery of a Bible verse, their names and wedding date. I quilted this entirely freehand with a Tree of Life motif, curving the branches and tree trunk based on her squiggly insets....

I really wish you could see the piecing and quilting on this -- we both think it is the best quilt we have ever done as a team!

Tomorrow Alex does her breakout session and then everyone takes off in the afternoon to go shopping!!!

Blogging 101

Blogging was not an easy thing for me to learn. I hadn't used a camera for many years and the new ones are nothing like the old ones. It was such a surprise that my new Canon PowerShot is so light, holds a kazillion pictures and is so easy to use.

However, I still had some basic inadequacies beyond learning to take pictures, so I had a list of things I needed to do but didn't know how. One was to link my blog to my website, and vice versa. Another was to put an attractive header on the blog rather than using one of the templates provided by Google.

When I was in Salt Lake City in August, I mentioned some of the things I wanted to do to Rhonda Lopez, owner of Nuttall's Sewing Centers. She just "happened to have a lady on staff" who could do all that for me! Rhonda took me upstairs to the office area and introduced me to Kirsten Malin.

Kirsten is quick with changes that I need, does a great job and is reasonable price-wise. She adapted a photograph of one of my quilts to make the header for the blog, put in the links I needed and the logos from the blog "families" that I belong to.

Right now, she is working on transforming my workshop pages. Some of them (the ones for which I have given her the information-- my bad that they aren't done yet!) are already done and you can click here to see them. She has set it up so that if you click on the workshop title, the supply list and a picture of the project will come up. This will save me a lot of time e-mailing information to guilds and store owners by enabling them to get the information online.

If you have a blog or website and would like some help with it, I would highly recommend Kirsten. You can e-mail her at kirsten.malin@gmail.com.

I Love Unwrapping Goodies -- Especially Fabric!

The best part of getting home, (other than seeing my husband's happy face at the airport, of course!) is going through the mail and opening the boxes that have accumulated while I've been gone. Sometimes I've ordered books, sometimes jeans and things from Chico's -- you know, stuff!

When I was at Asheville Cotton Company last month (click here if you missed my blog on this quilt store in Asheville NC), I was browsing about the shop and found a line of fabrics I really liked. It is called Close to My Heart and is designed by Faye Burgos for Marcus Fabrics. Some of the fabrics have the breast cancer pink ribbon in the print.

As I was running out the door, I pointed at several, but not all, of the fabrics and yelled to Robin "I need a half yard of each of these, please!" I thought later about it and that I wasn't really clear at all about what it was that I wanted, but she got it exactly right.


Not only exactly right, but with a red bow around it....I kind of lifted fabrics up and peeked inside before I took it apart....


Look at all the pretty prints -- love the butterflies, hearts masquerading as polka dots, words of love and encouragement to those afflicted with breast cancer....

A closer look at some of the great prints in this line....

And we can't forget the polka dots!

Robin, thank you so much! Big hugs to you, Chip and Michelle!

Fun to Travel -- Nice to Be Home!

Uneventful flights -- gotta love 'em! I'll be home Monday through Wednesday, then leave on Thursday to go to Livermore, which is located in northern California about 1/2 hour (or 3 hours, depending on time of day!) east of San Francisco. I'll be teaching at AAQ Retreats, which stands for Alex Anderson Quilt Retreats.

Alex originally started these retreats in 2001 as a place for members of her website message board to meet and sew together. She chose the Hilton Garden Inn as the location and me as her co-teacher. We had one three-day retreat each of the first two years and then had such a long waiting list that Alex added a second session starting in 2003.

Teachers and retreaters alike, we all look forward to getting together again to reconnect with old friends and make new ones. As usual, I'll be taking pictures and letting you in on all the fun!

When I was in Silver City, I stopped in Thunder Creek Quilt Company and this cute doll caught my eye. Of course she did -- she had purple hair with glittery gold (kind of tinselly, actually) streaks in it! There is a class available to make this doll taught by the owner, Cindy. She did divulge that the doll's hair is a pony tail scrunchy!!! Love it!

Okay, gotta go through all my mail, write my thank you notes to the wonderful people who hosted me on this trip, unpack, do laundry, repack -- oh, and by the way, finish a quilt for my friend Susan -- by Thursday!

Stay tuned --there will be a lot more about AAQ Retreats as the week unfolds.....

Quilting Traditions Revisited -- Silver City NM

A lot of guilds have quilt shows; NOT a lot of guilds have quilt shows that last almost two months!

The Southwest New Mexico Quilters Guild show, "Quilting Traditions Revisited", opened at the Silver City Museum on October 9 and will last through November 29. When Jude, one of the ladies who picked me up from the El Paso airport on Thursday, asked me if I wanted to see the show, there was only one answer from one who loves quilts -- Yes, of course!

Here is the front of the Silver City Museum taken from across the street...



And here is the sign in front advertising that it is open. The gift shop is pretty nice and I did have to spend a few minutes browsing, especially looking at the necklaces and pins made from silver tableware. A few of the silver patterns looked recognizable and the ones I liked were shaped into hearts before being slipped on chains or pin backs.

This is the sign just at the entrance to the show. One of these days I have to figure out how to turn the flash off....


There were 34 quilts, so this wasn't a large show. The room is small, so even getting those quilts up was a challenge. The smaller ones were hung down on floor level with the bed and the larger quilts were folded before being arranged on display.



At left, "Spanish Lanterns" by Kathleen Cole is machine pieced and quilted. There were two of these and they are hung as decorative drapes in her home.

Below, Kathleen also made "Mosaic Floor, San Marco, Venice"; also machine pieced and quilted. Both of these quilts were inspired by trips Kathleen has taken.

This is one of two quilts that Claudia Toenies contributed to the show. This smaller one, "Ohio Collection" measures 48"x48" and is both pieced and quilted by hand. As you can tell by the ribbon at the upper left hand side of the quilt, it won "Curator's Choice", one of the two awards given at this show.

The second of Claudia's quilts, "Quilt in the Round", was also hand pieced and hand quilted. This one measures 95"x95". I took a close-up so you can see how even and small her hand quilting is.

"Irish Eyes" by Caroline L. Miller measures 90"x108" and is "hand-quilted and mostly hand-pieced" according to Caroline. I only wish that I could have seen it unfolded.

This was the quilt that earned my "Viewer's Choice" ballot....and not just because it was pink! The piecing was incredible...and here's a close-up so you can see for yourself.

This quilt took the "Director's Choice" award.

"Stars & Chains" was machine pieced and quilted by Twila De Vinney from 1930's reproduction prints. I took a close-up of the unusual border. Rather than using prairie points as an outer edge finish, Twila used them as an intermediate border with the three-dimensional points laying against a solid final border.

Overall, I thought the show was a good mix, both in techniques and in the varying styles and sizes of quilts on display. If you happen to be in the Silver City area between now and November 29, don't miss it!