Quilting in the Desert

I’m in Phoenix right now, staying with a good friend and taking a couple of classes at a retreat called Quilting in the Desert. This is my third year doing that, and it’s such fun! It’s put on by the same people who organize Quilt Camp in the Pines each summer, and I’ve been going to that since 1998, so you have to know that I love it. 🙂

On Thursday I took another machine quilting class from Sharon Schamber, who does amazingly gorgeous work. We worked on learning how to do micro stippling in some of the many styles she used in her award-winning Spirit of Mother Earth. I don’t have a photo to show you of that, as I haven’t finished the sampler we began in that class.

On Friday Melinda Bula taught a class called “Renegade Thread Painting” — it was lots of fun. 🙂 She loves to make floral quilts (among others) with lots of thread painting on them, so we made a sampler of some of the techniques she uses for that thread painting. Here is my version of the eight-section sampler:

As you can probably see, we wrote our names in thread, practiced swirls, and then moved on to embellishing flower shapes with thread. Below are a couple of close-ups of some of the samples.

Here are some leaves with thread forming the spines and veins.

And here is a flower shape with echo quilting surrounding it.