Houston 2018 -- Classes

Hi all -

This is a bit late, but, finally, here is  my post about the classes that I took in Houston. I decided to take it easy this year and only took 4 classes. This was partly to give me more time to enjoy the show, take pictures of everything and spend some time with friends that I don't see anywhere else. I'm also getting more experienced with the show and have a better idea of which days I might want to spend in the classroom. Without further ado, here are my classes from 2018:

Tree of Life with Jane Sassaman, Mon 9-5

I love Jane Sassaman's work and I was really looking forward to a fun day of playing with her technique and looking at her art.Her style is just so appealing to me! Last year I took her class on drawing abstracted flora images, so this was a good next class for me.

In getting ready for the class, I had a tough time going through my fabrics to find things that might be appropriate for this project. I really wasn't happy with my choices, but I brought them anyway to have a starting point. Jane brought a bunch of fabrics for us, so I ended up buying new fabrics from her. With her fabrics, I could concentrate on learning her technique rather than stressing over whether my choices worked together.

In this class, we worked with Jane's Tree of Life quilt pattern. There were actually 5 or so versions of the pattern that we could choose from. Here are a couple of her class samples:

I really enjoyed this class. Jane is a very sweet and talented lady and is really fun to listen to. Her technique is fun and works well for these types of quilts. Here is what I got finished in class:

And here are the rest of the appliques I prepared in class and where I planned on placing them:

I'll probably pull this project out pretty soon so I can finish it up.

Sheer Irises with Esterita Austin, Tues 9-5

My Tuesday class was Sheer Irises with Esterita Austin. Esterita is a very talented artist and a very funny lady. I took her animal portraits class last year (I really need to pull that project back out and finish it....) so thought this would be a fun class to take this year. Esterita's background is in painting and she has found a technique for using sheers to mimic the effect of water colors. It's really pretty cool what she's done!

Esterita started the class with a slide show explaining the technique and showing some examples of what can be done with sheers. Then she demonstrated the technique so we could see it up close. Finally, we were given a class kit containing the line drawing you see on the screen above, an inspiration photo and a bunch of sheers to use for our own work. Here's the class sample that she brought:

And here's what I got done in class:

I thought the class itself was very good, but I really hated the classroom setup. For this class, she pushed two of those banquet tables together and put 6 people at each pair of tables. She had 3 or 4 mini irons to share at each table, which was really nice compared to the iron situation in most of the Houston classes, but it was really hard to arrange your supplies in any useful way in a space that was maybe 2.5'x2.5'. I ended up leaving early, when I got to the point where I figured I had heard everything she was going to say, because I just couldn't handle that cramped situation.

Painting with Needles -- Possibilities of Free-Motion Quilting with Noriko Endo,Wed 9-5

I'm also a big fan of Noriko Endo's work and this is the first of her classes that I've taken. I really want to take her mosaic class sometime, but I'm a little scared since a friend took it and she had to draw her own image in class to use for the technique rather than being given an image to use by the teacher. I would rather use an image designed by the teacher in a technique class. But I will pull up my big girl pants one of these years and take that class from her.

Anyway, this class sounded like it was just up my alley. Based on the class name and the description, I thought it would be a class about a technique that was some combination of free-motion quilting and thread painting. The supply list also sounded like that would be the class since we brought a quilt sandwich and some threads. Actually, this was a class about free-motion quilting and painting with paint and Noriko supplied the paints. Here is Noriko's class sample:

And here is another example of hers that I find a bit more appealing:

For our class project, Noriko had hand-drawn the face and wild hair on Golden Threads paper for each student. Wow! I couldn't believe she did all of the work! Each drawing had the same face, but there were differences in the hair as that part was supposed to be used just as an inspiration anyway. We pinned our images to our quilt sandwiches and then quilted the face lines and the main lines in the hair to give us a framework to work from. We then tore off the papers and embellished the framework with free-motion quilting. It was so amazing to me that she drew so much detail on each of these papers and we were to just throw away most of it. I'm pretty lazy so if I were her then I would have just drawn the lines that she wanted us to quilt rather than drawing all of that. But it was nice to see the details.

This is what I got finished in class:

I was pretty pleased with it considering it was done on a different sewing machine than I'm used to and considering that it was done with a 100 wt needle in the machine. It's really hard to quilt details with such a big needle!

I think that this was probably a good class for most of the students, but wasn't the best fit for me. I didn't feel like I learned much or got much out of the class. But I did like Noriko a lot and definitely plan on taking another class from her when I have the chance!

Sheer Faces with Esterita Austin, Sat 9-5

When signing up for my classes, I decided to take Esterita's Sheer Faces class on Saturday even though I was also taking her Sheer Irises class on Tuesday. I hesitated about this, but I really wanted to take classes on Saturday when the show would be crowded, but I was a lot more interested in the Irises class than the Faces class, so I just ended up with both. As you would expect, there wasn't much difference in the classes, besides the actual project that we worked on.

The class was set up the same as the Irises class. We went through a slide show much like the one used on Tuesday and she also gave us a hands-on demonstration. Both of these were very useful and I got more out of it the second time through, as you would imagine. But by Saturday I was tired and experiencing sensory overload, so I really couldn't handle the classroom situation and left even earlier this time. Here's what I got done in this class:

I do think that both of the sheer classes are good, but I wouldn't suggest taking both of them. Also, if you have the opportunity, I would take these classes somewhere other than Houston (or probably any quilt show). These classes would probably be wonderful in a guild setting or something like that where you might have some room to spread out.

Nancy