Workshop with Becky Goldsmith

The first meeting of the new year for the London Friendship Quilters' Guild was this past Thursday and our speaker was Becky Goldsmith of Piece O' Cake designs. What a fun evening!  Her whimsical quilts were bright and colourful. She spoke to us about picking colours for our quilts and showed several pictures of people and places that illustrated different colour schemes. I knew we were in for an interesting evening when I saw Becky's socks...

 

 

Here are a couple of the quilts that Becky showed us...

 



 

I love the way the colours in the applique pop off the backgrounds she chose for her quilts.

 

 

On Friday, I took a vacation day from work and participated in an applique workshop with Becky and 19 others.

 



This is the pattern for our project.  We learned how to make templates and trace them onto the fabrics we have chosen on the bias in order to make it easier to turn the edges under when doing our stitching.

 

By lunch time, I had this much done...

 



 



After lunch, we started sewing. Becky provided us with the tiny pins shown above and a couple of different needles to use for our hand sewing.

This is a needle threader which all of us used to get the thread through the tiny hole at the end of the needle!  Becky supplied the thread that we used. There are lots of colours in those two bobbin holders!

 Two edges sewn down...

I also learned to reverse applique and finished one of these windows at the workshop and then did the second one yesterday.

I also reverse appliqued the orange door onto the door frame at the workshop and then appliqued the door frame to the house yesterday.   I have the roof pieces cut out and ready to applique and hope to work on them later this week.

This 8" block is one of 9 in a wall hanging designed by Piece O' Cake Designs. I had fun at the workshop and will show more pictures of my block as it is completed in a future post.

Happy Stitching!