Stitch and Flip Workshop with Jacquie Gering

Jacquie Gering of Tall Grass Prairie Quilts fame was our guest speaker and workshop leader this past week at the London Friendship Quilters' Guild. You can see pictures of Jacquie's trunk show at the guild blog here. My post is going to concentrate on the wonderful stitch and flip workshop that I attended yesterday.

 

Jacquie started with a talk about how to make a stitch and flip unit.  She showed us several types of units and showed us examples of how they can be used to make various shapes and direction changes when putting the units together to create an infinite variety of designs.

 

 

During the workshop, Amalia came up with another type of stitch and flip unit that Jacquie called the "Amalia's Adjacent". You can see 4 of these units in the green star in the middle of Amalia's project.

 

 

This is Jacquie's design wall where she showed us examples of what we could make with the various units.

 

This quilt was made with stitch and flip rectangles instead of squares!

 

I started by cutting lots of 3.5" squares and green and yellow triangles.  I chain pieced lots of units and then started playing with them on my design wall.

 

 

First, I made a yellow flower with a long stem.

Next, an orange flower...

 

 

Then, my design wall fell down and all my pieces fell on the floor in a pile...it was not pretty!  I got them back up on the wall and got my pins out to pin them to the design wall so would not be in disarray again!

This little star is made with 1.5" squares and finishes at 3.5".  It became the centre of my next flower.

A star within a star!  Gwen Marston calls these liberated stars.

(You can see the pins holding everything up in this picture!)  I also started playing with curving the stems.

Every so often, I wandered around the room to see what everyone else was up to.  Lots of inspiration everywhere!  This is Carol arranging her units at the beginning of her project. You can see more at her blog here.

Jacquie also talked to us about how she quilts her pieces.

She often uses different coloured threads--in this case, a lighter gray on the horizontal and a darker gray on the diagonal (in this picture).

Here, purple threads for a few rows of stitching and then turquoise...

I really liked this one! She also explained how to do matchstick quilting which is straight lines about 1/8" apart (or closer).

Jacquie was kept busy all day, going from design wall to design wall, helping us all to make the most of our creativity and helping us to think through the challenges and fun of putting these units together. She had lots of energy and we all laughed a lot as we learned from her and each other.

Thanks for a great day, Jacquie!