Hand Quilted Minis and Stitching the City

This fall I am joining my friend Hillary’s studio and my upcoming October workshops are live on her site!

The first workshop, Hand Quilted Scrappy Mini Quilt, will be a combination of fast piecing and slow stitching. We will quickly pull and piece together colors that draw our eye and create small quilt tops, then slowly learn the art of big stitch hand quilting them into mini quilts.

For my sample quilt, I pulled lots of greens and blues, and added a pop of yellow. It’s sitting on my sewing table now, and makes me smile every time I look at it! The quilting is simple lines, probably about half an inch apart, with 8wt perle cotton thread, which is the same thread we will be using in the class.

The second workshop, Stitching the City, combines two (actually three!) of my passions: walking, cities, and quilting! I have loved living in cities ever since I first experienced walking and taking the streetcar in Portland, Oregon - for me, it was an incredible mental shift to go from a car-dominant lifestyle to one where walking was a possibility for so many trips. I also spent many years learning and teaching about urban planning, and I believe we can observe places so much more clearly at the pace of a walk.

I’m really looking forward to guiding our workshop group on a short walk around Downtown Frederick, and seeing which details around each corner bring inspiration. Each person will create a mini quilt top inspired by something they see or experience along the walk - mine is a mini version of a window at the Delaplaine Arts Center downtown.

Now that these are listed, I’m already dreaming up what my next set of workshops will be…