First QGI workshop

I can't remember exactly the date of this workshop.  What I do know is it was certainly while I was working on my first quilt top.  I imagine I had finished the middle nine patch.  Once though that section I learned quite a lot.  My nine patches were improving and I was feeling quite good about things.  My quilt teacher, I've been calling her S.B. and I'll now use T. (S.B. just looks mean to me), says we should take the Billie Lauder workshop.  Of course not knowing any better I agree.  It was a 60 degree diamond class.  Not having any idea what I was getting into I took my supply list to the quilt store and picked out some great batiks.  It is the first time I have worked with batiks and also my first real chance to pick out the light, medium and dark she called for.  I walk into class with my little brother sewing machine, which I got at Costco because the box said it came with a quilting package and since I would be learning to quilt that was the right machine for me.  I still to this very day love this sewing machine.  Anyway once in the classroom I see the class is full of all these very fancy Bernina sewing machine with all these wonderful ladies, many of which teach at the quilt stores.  Here I am still learning to sew a quarter inch seam, really hoping I don't run out of bobbin and as much as T. is trying to get it in my head press gently not the hard iron that I love so much and all around me are these quilt professionals.  Billie was so nice and fun and thought it I was crazy to choose the 60 degree diamond as my first workshop.  What she didn't know not only was it my first workshop but I was a complete beginner.  I sat there and just hoped I could keep up.  She gave great lessons on rotary cutting and setting up the sewing machine.  The first set of diamonds were cut and over all I did pretty good.  I was one of the first one's finished and Billie complimented my work.  At that point I finally relaxed a bit and thought hey I can do this.
Here is that first star.

     From there we moved onto the tumbling block.  I loved the tumbling block and any of the optical illusion patterns.  I was so excited to see if I could learn this one and I did.  Certainly some of the others in class looked better but overall I was happy with my fabric choice.  

After the tumbling blocks we moved onto a bigger star more lone star like.  We used striped piecing and a few more colors than the first star.  Once again I was pretty happy with my result. 

The last thing we did in class was work on basically 60 degree log cabin blocks.  At this point we have been sewing for about 5 hours and I had not at this point in my quilting worked that long or that hard.  My brain was overloaded, I had been working so hard to just keep up.  I cut 45 degree angles instead of 60 so of course it was all wrong.  I was too tired to re cut it so now I have some great 45 degree stripes waiting for a home and no 60 degree log cabins.  Overall I couldn't be happier that I took the workshop.  I still have very great memories from that day and my loud, slow brother machine kept up just fine.

Happy Quilting

CDC