A Class Act and A New Skill

 

Yesterday afternoon I did something I hadn't done in a very long time. I took a quilt class!

Over the past couple of years I've become enamored with hand piecing. One skill very much missing from my repertoire has been appliqué. I dearly love to do the buttonhole style appliqué; the process is rhythmic and my outcome is pretty even. 

There are some occasions, however when a less primitive, more polished look is what I want.

I'd participated in a class on needle turn about twenty-five years ago, but it didn't take. I never even finished the lesson project. 

When I saw on the class schedule that my wonderful LQS was offering a one-session class on hand appliqué, I decided to give it a try. The instructor is a member of my guild and I know him to be an imaginative and brave quilter who doesn't seem to have ever met a technique he couldn't ace. I didn't know what kind of a teacher he'd be, but he's a great guy, a good listener, and well-respected in the guild. So I signed up.

It turns out he's a brilliant teacher. In two hours on a rainy Sunday we were exposed to at least three different methods for hand appliqué and experienced hands-on practice for his favorite. He told us at the get-go when some of us reached for notebooks and pens that we wouldn't need to take notes: everything he'd cover was in the hand-out. It was. The kit he provided for each participant included everything you could imagine, down to a packet of jelly beans for just-in-case! On the table were scissors, scissors, scissors. There were also appliqué projects that he'd completed and a collection of books on the topic. 

That tiny plastic cup in the packet was for us to squirt some Best Press for our mylar project. He started out by explaining the mylar project and once we hand all traced, cut, and pressed and had progressed to hand stitching, he briefly explained and demonstrated the other methods. 

There were five of us in the class. How well did we do? Well, each of us came home with a Purple Heart!