Quilt Show

With my husband's help, my Quilt Room is improving. I can actually see the floor. I still have to put the design wall up, put the fabric in 'color' order and organize all my notions but it still looks a lot better.

This weekend is The Quit Fest of New Jersey V. I went on Thursday and started out really good. I just bought the taboo, Quilter's Home issue and two books, on quilting with strips. I figured, I needed those books for ideas on using up my stash. Then I realized that there were open quilt classes and before I knew it, I signed up for a full day class for the next day. Weaver Fever, taught by Jackie Robinson. This meant that I needed fabric. If I was home, I would have went to my stash and pulled fabric out but I was at a Quilt Show with lots of vendors. I needed 5/8Th's of a yard of 7 different fabrics, plus 1 1/2 of border fabric. Since I wasn't sure what I had home, I ended up buying 9 yards of fabric! So much for using up my stash! I went home put it all in the washing machine and went to get my hair cut. I went home, threw it in the dryer, watched American Idol. Bye Bye Tatiana. And I ironed the fabric, added some of my stash to it and began to cut it into strips according the the directions given by Jacki, the instructor. Unfortunately, I was tired while I was cutting the strips and missed the direction to cut some 1 1/2" strips. Good thing I brought the extra fabric with me to the class. I was embarrassed but I had to cut up the extra strips before I could set them in order.

Weaver Fever- The class ran from 9-4. It was a long day. Jacki Robinson was a lovely woman, very kind, with lots of patience. The poor thing had a cold but did her best talking while having laryngitis. First, Jacki showed us the correct way to cut strips and explained the correct way of sewing them together. This quilt requires exact 1 1/2", 2 1/2", 3 1/2" strips and exact scant 1/4 inch seams. Unfortunately, I'm not an 'exact' person but I chugged along anyways. Next was the sorting of the strips, first you place row one in order (according the the book directions), row two on top of row one 'one inch' below row two and keep on going till you get to row 10. Then you sew row 10 strips together strip 1 to strip 2, flip it over, don't break the thread and sew strip 3 to strip 4, etc until you sew all the row 10 strips together. Put that aside and sew row 9 and keep going until you get to row 1. Then you iron the 10 different strip groups. Now it's time to cut each of those strip groups into 1 1/2 inch rows, put the rows in order and sew row 1 to row 2, row 3 to 4, 5-6 etc until you have a block. So far for the entire day, I have one block finished. with 23 more to go. This is a lot of work. If I looked at the book without taking the class, I would have put it down and not buy it because without someone explaining it to me, I would NEVER have figured out the directions. Even now that I understand, I don't know if I'd do this again. I don't know. I'll have to finish this quilt. I put so much time and money into it already. I really want to finish it.