Building Houses with Jacquie Gering

I have taken classes with Jacquie Gering, past president of the Modern Quilt Guild, several times.  The first class was stitch and flip which I took with other members of the London Friendship Quilters Guild.  You can see my stitch and flip garden here.   My next class with Jacquie was at Black Creek Pioneer Village "Quilts at the Creek" and was all about improvisational piecing.   Last year, Jacquie was in St. Mary's and taught a two day "Quilting with Your Walking Foot" class.    Jacquie was a teacher before she quit her job to quilt full time.  She is energetic and enthusiastic and takes great delight in passing on what she has learned as she explores modern quilt making.  Jacquie is a life-long learner and encourages her students to keep trying new things.  Jacquie teaches concepts and then sets her students free to make their own individual projects using what they have learned.

This past Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday, I took two classes with Jacquie.  On Monday, Christine, Carol and I participated in her "Mid-century Modern Houses" workshop in St. Mary's, sponsored by Hyggeligt, a fabric store specializing in Kaffe Fasset fabrics in St. Mary's.  We were asked to bring a focus fabric (a print) and lots of solid scraps as well as some larger solids and a background fabric.

First, we cut up our fabrics into squares and rectangles of various random sizes.

You can see my focus fabric has cameras on it!  Jacqui encouraged us to use fabrics with colours from our focus fabrics as well as fabrics that just "go" with those colours, including some bolder colours.

We chain pieced pairs and then put the pairs together to make building blocks for our houses.

Here is my first house:

We started with simple and then explored other shapes and sizes of houses.

This house has a carport!  One of the other quilters thought a smart car would fit perfectly in my carport!

Next, I added a house with an attic.

Every house quilt needs an outhouse!

Here is my neighbourhood by the end of the day.  I have more ideas for future neighbourhood development... The turquoise grunge fabric will be my background.

Thanks, Jacquie for a fun day!   I will blog about the second class later.