"improvisation"

Woohoo! An Announcment

If you know me at all by now it should be clear that I am not enamoured of my desk job. I have grand fantasies that may or may not come true about making a career out of being a creative soul. But in order for me to have even a remote chance of achieving that dream I have to start somewhere. Today I am pleased to announce that I am taking the first step in that direction.

I got a teaching job!  Let's be clear, a job teaching quilting.  Okay to be even more precise, a job teaching Improvisational Piecing.

A month ago I took an afternoon off work with the nanny at home with the girls.  I pressed my sampler, prepared some pitches, and hit the stores.  And the first one bit!  I actually pitched three classes and they picked up Improvisational Piecing.  How cool is that?


So, if you are in the Calgary area in late November, please sign up and I'll do my best to educate and entertain you. To register you can do so at Along Came Quilting.

Here are the details:
November 13 and 20
1:30-4:30 pm
Along Came Quilting
Unit 12, 1220-59 Avenue SE
Calgary, Alberta

See you in November!

Another Form of Improvisation

Just in case it wasn't obvious in those photos of the water layouts, here is my current design wall. It's our brand new fence.  Gates optional at this point. It sure works well as a design wall, with one of our old white sheets thrown over it.

I haven't had a chance to work on any more layouts for the water quilt. And sadly now, some late summer rains are here for a few days so I'm not sure I'll get to them these weekend.  At least with the rain it means I am let off staining duty on that fence!

In the meantime I'm plugging away on the quilting of the grass quilt.  Over half done now.  And when I'm not quilting I've been trying to gain some order in the house and find another nanny. Our wonderful nanny decided to go back to school in September.  I've known  for a few weeks but Hubby was out of town and I couldn't motivate myself to do anything.  Despair is setting in. Good thing I have some vacation time to use.

There is more quilty stuff to come in the next few weeks.  I have a couple of announcements and bigger projects in the works.  Stay tuned! 

Water Version 3

Look at me changing things up.  This time I got rid of all the small pieces in this one.  And after so many of you liked them thrown into v2.

There needs to be some sort of transition between the short and long pieces, or could they simply be sewn together?  Thoughts?

And because I anticipated the comments, here is the same layout, flipped 90 degrees.  Water is horizontal, not vertical, so many of you said.  So here is this layout another way. Ah, the joys of photo editing software.
PS  Like so many of you I am really starting to see some of those more yellowy greens. Not sure what I'll do about that yet.

Water Version 2

Hmm, some very good and frank comments yesterday.  Thank-you so much. There is already more for me to think about.

This is v2.  v1 did not include all the pieces I made.  You can see that this version has those sections of more random, smaller pieces in the middle.  This design builds out from those pieces.

Oh, and to answer a question from yesterday, these layouts are probably about 70 or 80 inches by about 50-60 inches.  I'm just estimating.

So, thoughts on v2?