School of Threadology

Wow!  I'm way behind in blogging again, as usual!  So much has been happening, though.  I'm really impressed with the blogs I read where the authors blog through moving and vacations! 

The last week of June/first of July I had the outstanding opportunity to attend Quilt Hawaii, held at the Marriott on Waikiki.  There was a quilt show, vendors, and classes.  There was no doubt which class I wanted to attend--Superior Thread's School of Threadology, taught by Bob and Mother Superior (Heather) themselves as well as their good friend, Annie from http://www.byannie.com/.  I loved Annie because she lived in Alaska for years (she and her husband homesteaded--if you know anything about Alaska, you know that was no small feat!) AND, she sews on a Bernina 1080 just like me and neither of us would trade it for anything!

Bob began our three day seminar by discussing thread--debunking common myths, demostrating thread types, talking about twist, etc. 

Here we are, comparing two kinds of thread.  He just unwound big spools through the whole classroom!  After learning lots of fascinating information, we went to lunch and came back and got this:

It is a spool of just about every kind of thread they have.  Then we discussed the threads and next they had us do a great excercise with our machine's tension.  Finally, we got to play.  We each took a flower and did some thread painting.

I'm not sure if you can see the embellishing I did on the center flower.  Here is a back view:

This was so much fun.  It is the sort of "play" I want to do more of, but at home I'm intimidated by fabric selection or something.  So here, it was great.  Grap a block sandwich and go!

The morning of Day two was spent making a purse using Texture Magic.  Have any of you used it?  I hadn't, but I will be in the future.  It is really cool stuff.  It looks like a lightweight fabric and you stitch it to your "fashion fabric" (any type, quilting, home dec., heirloom, etc) and then steam it and it shrinks, drawing up the fashion fabric, creating fabulous texture.  Here is my purse:

The pink bottom is textured.  Annie designed the patterns and had samples of nearly all the patterns.  This one is a good representation:

You can see the center part is textured.  I need to comment here on Annie's work.  All the samples were exquisitely done.  I have never seen such incredible workmanship.  The insides were gorgeous, too.  There wasn't a crooked seam, pleat, fray, even a seam showing.  Linings were neatly done, etc.  It is a wonderful example to me and I think to a lot of us out there that you can take your time and get some excellent results.

After lunch on day two, we had a class on Superior Thread's fusible thread.  I hadn't worked with it before and it was quite amazing, too.  Again, I will be using it in the future!  I haven't mentioned that they brought the "thread bar," containers full of lots more of their wonderful thread for us to use in our projects.  Our project featuring the fusible thread was this little needle case:

All of the projects were so much fun becasue they were easily finished in class.  There is no pile of unfinished items at my house right now, just a collection of fun things, already done!

The third day, we played with more thread and Annie's Soft and Stable, making another fun little project, a notebook cover.

We had more thread info from Bob and then the workshop concluded with a trunk show featuring some of the most amazing quilting I've ever seen.  It was the kind of trunk show that leaves you absoluely "gob-smacked" and overwhelmed with quilting!  Here is a picture with Heather, Mother Superior, and just one of their gorgeous quilts.

Those black triangles?  And the black outer borders?  All that gold design is QUILTED!  Wow!

It was such a fun time and great learning and playing.  I can heartily recommend it to any of you.  If you get a chance to become a fellow "Certified Threadologist" I hope you will.