Class with Elizabeth Barton

I'm taking a class on Quilt University with Elizabeth Barton. It's called Dyeing to Quilt. It is sad that Quilt University will be closing down at the end of the year. With Carol Millers death, there is no one to run it so this will be it's last year. I'm glad I had signed up for this class. 

Some of the basic dyeing stuff I'm already familiar with. In the first lesson, we did a gray gradation to study value. I've never really done a value study and never made a quilt with blacks and grays. 

I decided to use this drawing that I made years ago after a class with Rosalie Dace called "Up Close and Personal". It was part of a word done in calligraphy. I really was drawn to the curves in it and the play of positive and negative space.  Even though I liked it a lot, I never did anything with it till now. I'd always turn to it  in my idea notebook but didn't really know what I wanted to do. For Elizabeth's class, I did for different value drawings. This is just one of them.

This is what the quilt ended up looking like.  I decided to go with an off center spiral for the quilting to echo the curves in the design.  I would like to keep going with this idea and use it for more value studies and also color studies.

I'm also excited that the classes for next years North Country Studio Workshops is up on  their site. I'm looking at the Quilting class with Cynthia Corbin and the Surface Design class with Jason Pollen. Both would take me out of my comfort zone and push me. Because Jason's class isn't just a "quilting" class, I would have to push myself more and be more out of my comfort zone. I've never really taken a class that wasn't a quilt class. Last years class at NCSW was the first class I'd ever taken that wasn't at a quilt show or workshop. I really enjoyed seeing all the other art that was being done. Elin Noble is teaching the Fiber class there but I really don't need to learn a new technique. It's a natural dyeing class and at this point in my life,  I don't need to learn something where I need to buy more stuff to work with.
Just need to decide which class I want to put as my first choice and which as my second.