Quilters of South Carolina

Last weekend was the annual Spring meeting for the Quilters of South Carolina. It was held this year in Newberry, SC at the Newberry Opera House. What a great venue (although a little crowded at times). The quilters from that area went out of their way to make it a pleasant time for all and I was glad to actually see the Opera House. It is small enough that you could go to a concert or show and actually see the people performing and it is close enough to our home in Hendersonville, NC that we could easily attend (2 hours). These days, it seems that it is so difficult to see a show that is in a space small enough that you can really enjoy it and I think I'll be trying out this locale in the near future.

Our guest speaker this year was Laura Wasilowski from Elgin, Illinois. For those of you who don't know, she is one of the founders of the Chicago School of Fusing and her talk centered around the activities on that campus. (And if you don't already know, this talk was definitely tongue-in-cheek!)

Laura was absolutely hilarious and had everyone in stitches (no pun intended). And the added bonus was that she sprinkled her lecture with original lyrics set to familiar tunes. And not only that, her singing voice was wonderful and I suspect that she may have had some vocal training along the way (or at least it sounded THAT good).

Another bonus of Laura's visit was that she brought patterns and hand-dyed fabric. I, of course, succumbed to the fabric. (If you'd like to see all of her fabric and threads, you can visit her website a http://www.artfabrik.com/ . And here to the right, she is autographing one of her books. I'll have to say that I enjoyed her lecture more than just about any I've heard in a long time. And she was just so pleasant. I'm sure that the people who took her classes had a blast.

So, it was a very good day in Newberry. And one of the best parts of the day was visiting with quilters from all over the state--some of them students who took one of my classes, some of them friends from Charleston whom I don't get to see very often now that I've moved and others that I've met through the years at other meetings. What a joy!