Sue Benner

I'm back from North Country Studio Workshops and my class with Sue Benner. What fun!! We worked our fingers to the bone but learned so much. Sue is such a great teacher. I would love to be able to take one of her other classes sometime.

This was the first time I've taken a class that was longer than 1 day. What a difference that makes!! You can cover so much more and really work on your projects. I still didn't finish any since we made 3 different quilts. This was her Composition Trilogy: Three Techniques for Fused Quilts. This was also different for me in that there weren't just quilters there and the other classes were other art forms (pottery, book making, encaustics, photography, etc)

Onto what we did in Sue's class:

This is the first quilt we worked on. We cut rectangles of different fabrics, kept some of them whole and cut the others into "frames" and then moved the pieces around. I decided to cut my frames with wavy edges. Since mine are so busy, I decided to add sashing between the blocks so it would be a little less confusing. I started trying out just one type of fabric (the one here is blue). I tried a couple different colors but nothing seemed right. I had it sitting up in the design wall and kept looking at it but nothing hit me as being right until the third day when I picked out the red fabric with the square spirals. I cut the squares out in a strip. I liked that and looked through my fabric and found the black fabric with white circles. There is a blue fabric with brown squares but it doesn't really show up. I will use the circles between the square and the squares around the outside of the quilt.


On the second day we worked with curvilinear shapes. We started out with an inspiration photo. That day my photo just wasn't really inspiring me so after staring at it for quite a while, I just tossed it aside. Found the black and white fabric in the pile of shared fabrics and decided to make a vase out of it and just have fun playing with a nonrealistic flower arrangement. I freehand cut and placed things and had fun.

The third day we worked on landscapes. I didn't find an inspiration photo to bring with me. Instead, I took a picture from the parking lot where we parked at the art building. I drew a rough little sketch that night, taking out the building and adding in the mountains that were all around us. I'll put up some more of those photos tomorrow.

This was a fun landscape to make. We used some of the scraps of the edges we cut off and then fused more fabrics to cut into strips to use. During the critique, Sue suggested adding little slivers of lighter brown to the edges of the trees to highlight them and make them stand out a little more. I also decided not to add all the trees from the photo.

Now to finish these up. Need to quilt the flowers and landscape and put the sashing in for the squares and then quilt that.

I took today off of work to give myself a chance to come back to reality and work on the quilts while I was still energized from the workshop. Tomorrow it is back to work and reality.