Last Week

 Last week was a pretty busy week.  Flavin Glover visited our Guild for a lecture and class.  Since I'm the Program Chairman this year, I had the pleasure of spending some time with her as I took her to dinner, helped her at the meeting and was her "go-fer at the class.  She is such a lovely person and her quilts are simply amazing.  It is difficult to imagine how she can take a simple log cabin block and create such complex and beautiful quilts.  I think it takes a special kind of mind to do that--one that is good at math and is creative at the same time.

 This was my personal favorite.  She pieced the farm land and the sky and mountains in the back are log cabins.

 This was the quilt that was featured in the the class she taught although she focused on the many ways to shape and stretch log cabin block and offered several choices for the final selection of each student.

 And here you can see her quilts laid out all around.  Everyone was fascinated by the variety.  It was a great visit and everyone who took her class came away inspired.

 I will be teaching a "Quilting With Feathers" class at the State Retreat in October and my Art Group volunteered to be my "practice " class so I could iron out the bugs and see what I needed to do to improve it.  We met in a Club House on John's Island on Saturday and everyone got right to work.  Here is Dotty concentrating on the relationship between the speed of the machine and the speed of the hands moving the fabric.

 Linda and Doreen are admiring the results of their labors.  Both of these women are quite new to machine quilting and they were amazing.  They jumped right in and kept up--not only kept up but excelled in their efforts

 And here are Tommy and Pat concentrating on their quilting.  Tommy has a stitch regulator on her machine and the stitching didn't look as good as it should have.  I had her remove it and it resulted in wonderful stitches.  I don't know why because I don't use a stitch regulator but she will probably get some further instruction on it to see if she can get a good result with it.  After all, that's why one would want to have it in the first place.  Pat had machine problems, also, but kept a good spirit in spite of it and made quite good progress throughout the day.

And here is Zoe hard at work.
It was a really great day and I was very pleased with how the class moved along with the progressive learning method I had chosen.  And now, I'm looking forward to the "real" thing.




A footnote:  This has nothing to do with quilting, but with quality of life.  For the last few months, the pain in my hips has gotten worse and worse and, finally, I wasn't able to walk more than 50 yards without a pretty high level of pain and the pain in my foot was so bad that I was almost ready for the surgery that is going to include a one year recovery period.  I was imagining hip replacement and who knows what else.  Since I'm not too keen on extraneous trips to the doctor, I decided to try a low tech approach first.
What did I do?  Simply, I gave up sugar.  Not fruit and things like that but, certainly, all sweets and have minimized bread and non-complex carbohydrates.  It's been a little over two weeks and now I can walk my daily walk with zero hip pain and much reduced foot pain.  It truly is almost like a miracle.  Did I know better than to eat all that bad stuff in the first place?  Of course, but we do what we do, don't we?  I'm hoping I've learned my lesson because mobility is worth the sacrifice.  And I'm not saying it will work for you.  But, if you're so inclined, give it a try--and you might lose a few pounds in the process.  That's what I'm hoping!