Improvisational Piecing with Jacqui Gering

This past Friday, Christine and I attended a workshop at Black Creek Pioneer Village in Toronto. The York Heritage Quilters organized the workshop and had their members' quilts displayed around the pioneer village on Saturday and Sunday. I had so much fun at the Flip and Stitch workshop that Jacqui taught at the London Friendship Quilters' Guild in the spring, that we decided to sign up for another class. 

I love the quilting on Jacqui's class sample! 

Jacqui started out by showing us her quilt and asking us what we saw.  She explained how she just grabbed a handful of scraps out of her green, brown and orange bins and started to make blocks for her quilt.

She taught us how to add angled pieces to our blocks and about how the background fabric should make pathways into and through the blocks.

Orange is Jacqui's favourite colour...

Her mantra for the day "let it go".  Forget the "rules".  I love her style!

There were 25 students in the class and she made it around to see everyone and talk about fabric choices and ideas for blocks before lunch. I had brought some selvage fabric with me, leftover from BIQR last September. Jacqui suggested I use small bits of the selvage fabric and cool coloured scraps (blues, greens and purples--lights, mediums and darks of each). I had brought a bin full of all my scraps and white background fabric. The scraps were all in zip lock bags by colour so I did not have to dig through a jumble of scraps to find what I wanted.

Here are my first couple of blocks.  I got a bit more daring on my next block...

 

 

 

This one was Jacqui's favourite of all the blocks I made.

 

 

After lunch, she showed us how to take our odd sized blocks and put them together into a quilt. That is blue masking tape on the design wall...

 

 

This quilt was a sample for Saturday's slash and insert class.   Jacqui showed us her sample quilts for the next day's class and talked about how she quilts most of her quilts on her domestic sewing machine. She uses a lot of thread as her quilts are densely quilted and the quilts have lots of texture as a result.  (Take a look at the picture at the top of this blogpost!)

 

Christine and I had a great day!  Here are the blocks that I had finished by the end of the day...

 

 

Christine and I will be getting together tonight to work on our quilts again. I would like to have this done before our guild show in October.

 

 

Thanks for a great workshop!  I went home inspired to keep playing with my scraps.