Monday, August 6, 2012

Brother Int'l Convention -- Nashville TN

First is the mad dash to get there:  Getting up at 00:dark:30 to get to the airport, flying across the country and passing through a couple of time zones on the way, collecting luggage, hailing a taxi and finally reaching the convention center. 

First up is decorating the classroom.  I had brought quite a few samples with me to show dealers what kinds of classes I can offer to their customers.....

On the left is a machine embellishment sample.  The middle is my contribution to an exhibit called "Quilting Makes the Quilt" that was shown at Road to California.  On the right is a trapunto by machine sample.

Clockwise from top:  Trapunto Christmas tree skirt, sample of some of the fun things we do in free motion class, Positive/Negative: Adding Color to Trapunto by Machine (that's the green & white one), doodling free motion on printed fabric (I did this one in a class I took from Cindy Needham), and a small trapunto by machine class that can be done as a half day workshop.


Closeup of one of my free motion workshop "scribble" sandwiches -- these are where I try out new patterns before I actually stitch them onto a quilt.

Closeup of the trapunto quilting and stippling on the Christmas tree skirt.....


More of my small display pieces and class samples...The two on the right are my machine applique class samples; the floral one is mock hand applique and the Halloween haunted house uses a number of applique and embellishment techniques.  The small quilt to the left is a woven block surrounded by trapunto triangles (it's a tiny version of my Tequila Sunrise quilt) and the big one is a quilt made of Christmas fabrics where I show four different styles of background quilting.


I love this little haunted house!  Probably because it has bats flying all around it???. 

A fun thing in my classroom was this giant spool of Mettler thread!  It was actually hollow and I could drop spools of thread inside so that when dealers wanted to take a spool home, they could just take one from the fixture.  It's so cool looking, though, that all the dealers wanted to take the giant spool home....

My friend Phil Newton of Mettler Threads provided a lot of thread for our projects as well as the dispenser and the thread to go in it.  To all the dealers who wanted to just tuck this display in their suitcase, I had to say, "Mine! Mine! Mine! Ask Phil for your own!"

Next I'll show you the classroom setup, the project we worked on and what all the fuss was about!

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