IQF Day 4

Friday began with demoing free motion quilting and promoting my new DVD; Design, Paint & Stitch in Open Studios.

Art quilter, blog friend and fellow art school college alumni Kristin LaFlamme stopped by to say hello with her daughter Katja.

 

Me, Melly and Australian art quilter Sue Dennis after Melly's lecture on inspiration.

In the evening we had a dinner with many of the artists who participated in the Beneath the Surface exhibit.

I believe this is about the time I began describing my experience with middle age dating in the new millennium, I think the best option is to find lots of humor in it.

Sarah Ann Smith, Deborah Boschert and Linda T. Minton

 Frances Holiday Alford, Rachel Perris and Jamie Fingal

 Jane LaFazio and her friend Paula Elliott, Sarah Ann Smith, Deborah Boschert, Linda T. Minton

Nina and Me

Spooning with Friends

What can I say, we are a group of women with many talents. One that is sort of becoming tradition at festival is hanging spoons off our noses at dinner.

 Leslie Jenisen

Melly Testa

 Melly and Jamie Fingal getting ready to spoon in the Hilton bar.

 Jamie

 Me

Quilting Arts editor Helen Gregory showed her talent by hanging a spoon on her chin.

Pokey, is a novice at this, but I am sure by next festival she will have mastered this new skill and will be weilding a spoon just as well as a rotary cutter.

International Quilt Festival Long Beach: Day 2 Open Studios

Friday morning started with a couple hours in Open Studios at Make it University.

My daughter Nina participated in Open Studios for the first time. She displayed one of her Asian ball jointed dolls and the clothes and wigs she designs and makes for them, as well as her sculpted hearts and skulls and a portfolio of her other work.

I was so thrilled to finally meet my online friend Alisa Burke, she is a creative dynamo! 

Here's my good friend Jane LaFazio demoing how she makes her gorgeous felted and stitched fiber work on a needle felting machine.

This is so Jane! You know you are gonna have fun when you're with her.

Pokey, Alisa and I between activities.

My friends Leslie Tucker Jenison and Jamie Fingal who curated the fabulous Beneath the Surface exhibit premiering at the Long Beach show, it will also be exhibited at IQF Houston in November.

In the afternoon I taught a workshop at Make it University making the embossed metal origami pop up book.

International Quilt Festival Chicago

I want to start off by saying my daughter Nina was the acting photographer during festival. She took loads of wonderful photos, you will see many of them here and on the Quilting Arts site. I am leaving for New Zealand today and have been trying to throw together a couple blog posts about festival before I go. I will probably set them up to post over the next couple days since I have quite a few photos.

My day started on friday by going straight to Make it University and seeing Pokey. Poor Pokey had her ipod stolen during booth set up on thursday. Unfortunately her ipod had all her music for Surviving the Runway on it, so the first thing we did was search for great 60's music to download to get everyone feeling groovy.

Pokey, who was just a twinkle in her daddy's eye in the 60's, is trying to place this recommendation, I had to introduce her to the wonders of Herb Alpert and the Tiajuana Brass' A Taste of Honey and Melanie's Brand new Key.

At noon Nina and I had lunch with art quilt teacher and podcast creator Bonnie McCaffrey

and the lovely Maggie Weiss, art cloth creator extraordinaire, both such fabulous women.

Of course we had to stop by and visit my good friend Frieda, Laura was off teaching in some other part of the world.

Here's Jane Davila's husband watching her work in her booth.

Kelli Perkins from Common Life into Art and Kayla from Living the Creative Teen Life  working Open Studios.

I also worked in Open Studios on friday and its always fun hanging with Kristin Rodriguez from Fiber on a Whim.

Jane and Kristin in their booths right next to each other along side Make It University what was IQA thinking when they planned that layout, lol.

I think this photo is so funny, I look like I am having a really good time, which is what I always have when I am at festival! I love seeing my dear friends that I only see at festival and I love making new friends each time I go. Sharing our ideas, learning from each other, laughing and supporting one another is what it's all about. It makes life so rich.

Festival: where to begin...

It has taken me a couple days to catch up with life enough to start writing a blog post about our adventures in Houston. I have been to Festival every year for the last 13 years, this trip was a lot of fun but way more exhausting than any trip I have ever taken. Teaching at International Quilt Festival entailed so much planning, packing, shipping, focus and talking... since I was also teaching a workshop for Make It University and doing two sessions of Open Studios in addition to my two 6 hour classes.

I started Open Studios early on Wednesday night since MIU was short someone to start the night, so I spent 3 1/2 hours demonstrating embossing copper, meeting people and talking about various techniques. Here's a look at my table.

I think I always have too much stuff at Open Studios because I never know what people want to see the most, so I tend to bring a lot of smaller art work, especially things people may have seen in the magazines so they can see the work up close.

The little canvas and copper cover books really seemed to appeal to people, I think I will have to add that to my regular workshop offerings, it will need to be a two day workshop though.

Working across from me was my good friend Leslie Tucker Jenison from San Antonio.

Following Leslie was Alma de Melena Cox who creates beautiful and bright mixed media collages with fabric paint and wood.









Thursday morning I taught Mixed Media Painted Fabric, luckily I had thrown in a few extra kits because I had 3 additional students in class for a total of 28.

This is a class that has concepts very different from a lot of ways we are used working, like painting objects by painting the background to create the imagery. Layering paper images and paints, seeing colors come through from underneath and adding layers of color on top of color. It pushes people outside their comfort zone and hopefully has them thinking and looking at things in a new way.

It was fun seeing a few familiar faces from my old Austin days!

It was great getting to meet Susan Bruebaker Knapp in person after getting to know each other by email last year. She was very ambitious and painted a huge piece of cloth.

It can be so hard getting people to stop working and put their pieces on the wall!

Such a fun class!

More festival pics to come...