Dispatches
April 2006

So are you ready for QBL 2006? It is hard to believe it is only 3 months away, but so it is. You should have just received your mailing from QBL confirming your registration, and reminding you about the final payment. Don’t forget the May 15th deadline! I can’t wait to see friends and to have another fun and stimulating QBL experience!

I'm going to have some fun here. I'm going to play around and discover some really neat stuff.

A Closer Look

Design Exercise

Books to Consider

A Closer Look

Cheryl Hayes will be teaching a workshop this summer from the book Blending Photos with Fabric: A Beautiful New Way to Combine Photography, Printing and Quiltmaking which she co-wrote with Mary Ellen Kranz. If you have been at QBL during the last few years you may have had an opportunity to see some of the beautiful photography Cheryl and Mary Ellen have printed on fabric.

Cheryl says she has been sewing since “I can't remember”. Her mother was an avid sewer and couldn't wait to teach her to sew. Cheryl says she has been told that she sat on her mother’s lap at a treadle machine, and while her mother worked the foot pedal, Cheryl made bean-bags! In middle school Cheryl began wearing her own creations, even making her mother a three-piece suit in eighth grade. Cheryl says no one believed she had made the suit, and the fabric was horrendous!!

One of Cheryl’s most prized wedding gifts was a top of the line Viking sewing machine. Even though her mother took a quilting class in the seventies, Cheryl said she had absolutely NO interest in all that hand sewing. It was when Cheryl saw quilts sewn with machine quilting sometime in the eighties that she, “knew that process was for me.” She said she loved the look of the beautiful thread stitching adding another dimension to the fabrics below. Having grown tired of the tediousness of garment construction, and making clothes for my children, Cheryl started making them quilts!

Cheryl took her first machine quilting class with Diane Gudinsky and has been “having a ball” ever since! She says, “there is so much to explore in the world of quilting, that it satisfies my need to learn and try new ideas.” In the late nineties, Cheryl purchased a Gammill long-arm quilting machine and built a beautiful studio on a mountain top in New Hampshire.

Cheryl sums it up beautifully; “I always marvel at the beauty around me and the wonderful skill my mom passed on to me. Like so many other creative spirits, we build on those who have gone before us, and we try to pass our passion onto others. It is so joyous to see a spark come to life when I'm sharing my quilting with someone. Who cannot be happy with so much color and form to view?”

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Many of the faculty for QBL 2006 also have web sites. Check the Faculty information on the QBL website for their links!

Learn something new. Try something different. Convince yourself that you have no limits.

~ Brian Tracy

Design Exercise:

Creativity is an essential part of being human, a vital force without which we can exist, but not truly live.

~ Anne Cashman

Find what you were not looking for…

1. Out of sturdy white or light grey paper, cut a rectangle approximately 2” x 3”.
2. Place the rectangle with the short side on the top, and cut a 1” square out of the rectangle, about half an inch from the top.
3. Randomly open a glossy paged magazine, and with an exacto knife, cut a 1 1⁄2 in square through as many pages as you can cut at once.
4. Use the view finder you made in Step 2 to look at the squares cut from the magazine. Look for interesting shapes, color combinations, negative space etc.
5. For variation, you could try this with discarded photographs, black and white illustrations, or even with large print from newspapers.
6. The unplanned view you get through the viewfinder may give you ideas for designs, blocks, or maybe it will just be fun to see what you can find.

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Books to Consider

More of your brain is involved when reading than it is when you watch television... because you are supplying just about everything... you're a creator.

~ Margaret Atwood

I recently came across a “real find” among the bargain books of a major book selling chain. The book, by Susan Vreeland, is called The Forest Lover. While it is a novel, it is about a real woman artist named Emily Carr, who painted in the early part of the 20th century in the Pacific Northwest. The novel is full of references to color and images, and is written in such a way that you can almost see what is being described. I LOVED this book! I have gone on to read another book by Susan Vreeland that is short stories about famous artists called Life Studies. While not as captivating as The Forest Lover, the stories are entertaining and interesting. I have not read her more well-known novel, The Girl in Hyacinth Blue, but will put it on my list!

Since it is almost QBL time, it is almost time for a new book list. In the meantime, here is the next installment of the 2005 QBL booklist:

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Until next time, Happy creating!
Kathy
qblnews@aol.com

Past Dispatches
February 2006
November 2005
June 2005
April 2005
February 2005
October 2004