Class with Susan Else

This Friday and Saturday, I took a class from Susan Else. You can see some examples of the kind of fabric stuff she does here, on her website. She did a quilted skeleton that's amazing, plus some quilted teapots that are very cool.


It was a really good class. Here Susan is standing in front of an arrangement we made *on her background* with all the class samples we did - she showed us how to do a reverse applique technique for making the backgrounds, how to layer things to produce the illusion of greater depth, how to work with color and scale, etc. So much of this will also translate from art, to art quilts, and even to traditional quilts-for-beds.


Lunch each day was exquisite. ;) The china changed daily, as did the table coverings. Friday's theme was Italian, with superb salad and pasta courses, and Saturday's theme was Mexican, with the chilled avocado soup you see there, followed by a chicken enchilada, served with blue chips, salsa. Our snack later on in the afternoon was a rice pudding with tangerine slices. Absolutely fantastic food, both days, catered by Paula Hamilton, the one standing, wearing a pink shirt, in the picture above.


Susan taught us how to do lots of three dimensional things to add to our quilts and wallhangings, the vines you see there, two different techniques for the flowers and leaves, plus how to attach different design elements.


Best of all, she worked with us on designing our OWN 3D animals and figures. You'll see on her website she does people as well as the animals/monsters we did in the arrangement above. We laughed a lot, and learned a lot, both!

I'll post pictures of the things I did personally later, when they're done. Mine isn't in the arrangement above, but she's a bluegreen batik book-toting librarian-monster. :)