Diane Gaudynski class sampler

I finished up my samplers for the Diane Gaudynski seminar I took, though they are only quilted, not bound. This is the basic practice piece -- not too much change, but I especially like the Celtic Circles in the upper right corner.

I am actually surprised how well my feather sampler turned out. All the feathers were freehand, and one interesting aspect for me was to play with the thread color. Diane Gaudynski tends not to use varigated threads because she feels you get better results choosing where you want what colors. I am not that happy with some of my choices, especially the gold in the upper left corner. It actually looks fine in the overall picture, but in real life I think it would have worked better for the feathers rather than a background motif. Smaller scale and not quilting the grid may also have worked better. Ah well, I do not think i am motivated enough to tear that whole section out and redo with a less dominant thread.

Below are some details, where you can see the effect of different thread colors. I wish I had some of every color available!

Diane Gaudynski Seminar

My one real quilting experience this summer was that I was able to attend a 2-day seminar with Diane Gaudynski. For those of you who don't know her, here is her website. She does absolutely amazing, detailed machine quilting, all on her home sewing machine.

The seminar was excellent. I was able to borrow a Bernina with BSR from the shop where the seminar was held (one model up from the one I use). Diane brought in a number of her quilts to show us, and they are even more stunning in person then in books and on the web. She is a very encouraging teacher, and she introduced a number of motifs that could be used for background as well as helping us to work on our feathers. One of the most interesting things I learned was to use different colors of thread to give depth to your quilting. I think I am a convert now. I just wish I had easier access to quality thread! She also recommended using wool batting because you get the loft of trapunto without the work. I used it for the class samples and loved it.

Here is a picture of a sampler we worked on to practice the different designs. I have filled it out since, but this picture shows what I was able to do in class. And some close-ups of some of the practice squares. Diane teaches students to do what she calls echo feathers -- instead of backtracking on parts of the feather, you leave a small corridor between them. It was a new way for me to do them. Her lines are, of course, perfectly parallel. Mine are not!

In this picture you can see the feathers and the "folded towels" texture, as well as some small "pearls" to the right of one of the feathered area. All of this is done with minimal marking.












The next picture shows some clamshells and some pebbles to set off the feathers. Again, for the clamshells, I only needed to mark parallel lines!















And finally, one of my favorite backgrounds -- Tsunami. I love how this one looks, but it would take quite a lot of thread if done on a large part of a quilt, lol.

I also made a sample with feathers that uses different color threads in the background. That is for the next blog!

My Summer Purchases

Although I didn't get much quilting in when I was in the US this summer, I did have some time to visit quilt shops. Here is the fabric that I got:
You can see I mainly purchased batiks and tone-on-tones. I hope to put them to good use this year! I also got 20 yards each of Kona Snow and Kona Black, but no need to include a picture of that.


I also managed to get some thread in various colors, some templates, and new gloves for machine quilting with. I don't have pictures of those, but I think I did pretty well.