Sunday 26 July 2015

Arabesque workshop 29th & 30 August 2015 cancelled

Arabesque workshop with Jenny Bowker   2 days

This workshop will teach you to play with a selection of patterns to produce designs suitable for quilts made with blocks – but your blocks will be appliquéd like Islamic blocks.

It is really curious that quilters make hundreds of wonderful block designs with geometric piecing, but the moment they think about appliqué they use a cream square and put something in the centre that does not touch the sides. We will work with ways to create stunning tile patterns for appliqué.

Pattern is defined in the Concise Oxford dictionary as "a regular form or order … or design." We will look at the way pattern appears in nature - while there is usually an underlying structure there is often a lot of variation within the basic design. We can play with patterns that nature produces for us or produce patterns of our own using several different systems.
It is a design based workshop where you will not produce a finished quilt, but will work with many small sample design ideas in paper. Most of your time will be used in working up designs

Student Requirements List: is available on Jenny Bowker's website  http://www.jennybowker.com/arabesque/

Skill level: A willingness to work in new ways is necessary for this class. Some experience is useful but not essential.

Jenny Bowker
Jenny has been working in Textiles since 1997 - from the time she finished a Bachelor of Arts Degree (Visual) and decided to make just one quilt.

Her background - life before quilts - was in science. She is moving towards a melding of her fine art work and her textile work. She is interested in the way pattern comes into many parts of our lives and often include some geometrical piecing in her work as she thinks it keeps her technically on her toes and provides a key for traditional quilters to link to her work.

She has four children and a very supportive husband who worked as a diplomat for the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade. While following him she lived a total of fifteen years in Arab and Islamic countries. This might seem irrelevant to quilting, but has influenced her subject matter and much of her work reflects her love of the Middle East. She has lived in Syria, Western Samoa, Malaysia, Jordan, Jerusalem and Egypt.

She teaches and really enjoys it. There is no greater delight than to offer tools to a quilter who wants to make original work but doesn't know how to access her own ideas.
For more details about her background and experience in quilting go to her website at www.jennybowker.com.

Queanbeyan Quilters Inc had their 2015 AGM last week

Another year has rolled around and the Committee has been very busy with meetings, workshops, newsletters and events for the membership. Thank you to all for your hard work, it has been much appreciated. We are sad to see some step away to pursue other interests but it just goes to show what a diverse group of people that we are, with plenty going on.

For those who were not at the AGM, the positions were filled as follows:

President:   Bryony De La Motte
Vice-President:  Julie Herring
Secretary:  Michelle Livanes
Treasurer:  Narell Smit
Committee:
Library:  Glenis Feltham
Publicity:  Cassandra Philpot
Newsletter:  Julie Herring

Congratulations to all on their new roles, here's to another exciting year and a great Exhibition in April. There will be lots of progress reports on that in the intervening few months.


The Monthly Inspirations for August were:

Yellow
Appliqué
People and figures

Tuesday 14 July 2015

Drop in this week and take up quilting

This Thursday is the third one of the month, when Queanbeyan Quilters get together to stitch and share news. Bring quilting, sewing, knitting, hand or machine work of any kind and spread out in our light premises at the RB Smith Community Centre at 264 Crawford Street in Queanbeyan. From 9.30 am to 12.30 pm, we look forward to seeing you there.



This is our Challenge pack, why not pick one up and prepare something for our Exhibition next April 9th and 10th 2016. Buy one at our next meeting which is the AGM on 24th July 2015.