Technique Classes

Teaching technique classes is my favorite kind of teaching because students gain skills to enhance their quilts, and I hope, become inspired to create their own designs or to adapt other people's designs. These classes will add to your skill toolbox and push you in new directions.

Demystifying Design for Foundation Paper Piecing

6-hour class, best as two 3-hour classes

This may be my favorite class to teach because I don’t know anyone else who teaches quite what I offer. You’ll learn to create foundations for everything from traditional blocks to pictorial quilts. We’ll start with designing foundations for simple blocks then move to more complex blocks. In the process, you’ll discover when foundation piecing is the best piecing process for you. You’ll design a block, and you’ll design a small pictorial quilt working from a photo or drawing you bring to class.

While there won't be quilt police in the classroom, you will meet the Paper Police© who will become your new BFFs on your journey to design for foundation paper piecing. Their goal is your success.

Skills taught in the class will include:

Determining the number of foundations needed.
Learning how to draw lines to divide your design into foundations that you can piece with no Y seams.
Numbering foundations for piecing order.
Labeling foundations and marking them for joining to other foundations.
Making templates for cutting patches for on-grain piecing and efficient use of fabric.

This is a technique class but you will take home foundations for log-cabin and kite blocks, a block pattern and a pattern for a pictorial quilt. You’ll be creating quilts with extreme angles, sharp points, precision piecing, easy cutting, one-of-a-kind images and more before you know it.

Finding Your Design Sense

15 hours in five 3-hour sessions plus an optional critique session

If you’re ready to design your own quilts but aren’t sure where to start, this class will introduce you to the basics of design — balance, unity, variety, line, shape, value, color, pattern, texture and more — through in-class activities and at-home play projects between sessions. You’ll learn what appeals to you toward developing your design style. In this class, you will:

Learn concepts of design you can use to design quilts and to adapt other people’s designs;
Be stretched to try new ideas, some that may push you to a new place and some that will affirm your ability as a designer; and
Become confident that you can make quilts unique to you.

The class will be four three-hour classes spread over four months, allowing time between classes to use what you learn.

Circling Charley:

Quick & Easy Inset Circle

4-hour class

Learn to inset circles into blocks and circles while making a table or bed runner. You’ll be amazed how easy it is to do. Using a technique developed by Cheryl Phillips that requires minimal pinning — eight pins per circle no matter its size — you’ll make the first block for this quilt in a few hours. Then you’ll perfect the technique so by the end of the class, you’ll likely have made two or more blocks, and you’ll know how to continue making blocks for as large a quilt as you want.

Circle of Friends

One-day class, offered as one-day, 6-hour class or two 3-hour sessions

I designed “Circle of Friends” as a way of teaching Cheryl Phillips’ surprisingly simple technique for insetting circles using her Cut-a-Round tool. You’ll master insetting circles into blocks and circles into circles using just eight pins per circle no matter the size. You’ll make the first block for this quilt in a few hours, then you’ll perfect the technique so by the end of the class, you’ll have multiple blocks done — perhaps enough for a table runner. You’ll know how to continue making blocks for as large a quilt as you want.

Finding Your Color Sense

Variable lengths from a half day to 12 hours in four 3-hour sessions

Each of us has an innate color sense though not all of us are in touch with it. My approach to teaching color for quilters is to help you find your color sense through a series of activities the culminate in you creating a fabric color wheel to hang in your sewing space. This class can be offered as a half-day class up to four three-hour sessions with time between sessions for you to practice all you learn. This class has been enjoyed by those terrified of color, those confident with color and those somewhere in-between. You’ll learn to find color palettes in photos and your surroundings, how to create dimension with color, and color theory in ways that won’t cause your eyes to glaze over.