Zen Doodles Workshop

I am a member of the Old Capital Quilt guild, and each month the guild brings in a speaker and a workshop. These workshops always take place during the week, so I am generally unable to participate due to work.  This month the instructor was Laura Wasilowski.  I think I've professed a love for her artwork on my blog before- without a doubt, I knew I had to take her class.

She spoke last night at the guild- about making serial quilts. The same thing, and doing it a lot.  Lots of artists work in series, but I loved her reason why "then you don't need a new idea for a long time!"  Her talk was filled with incredible humor, and funny songs.

Today's workshop was on Zen Doodle quilts. I had taken her Craftsy class (hey, it's on sale this week)  so I was a little wary going into it (due to a bad experience with a Des Moines AQS workshop, my rule was to never take a class where I knew something about the subject: that was an advanced free motion class where we spent the whole time stippling and doing basic meanders, what a waste of money)- but I am SO glad I did it.  I'm not sure I really learned anything new exactly, but the class really got my creative juices flowing and I love the project I made.

The class kit included about a 1/2 yard of a dark rainbow colorway and 1/4 yard of a pastel (full length of the yardage- but 1/2 and 1/4 WOF).  We were also given a few strings of embroidery thread so we can embellish when we got home.

After going over some basic rules of fusing, we were given some time to doodle. We were told to make 12 doodles, but I only took a picture of 6.

Then, we took our favorite doodle and made it a large pattern.

Then, we made the pattern into fabric!

One of the things we did was embellish the fabric pieces with other fabric. The zig zag pieces on the triangles are not patterned fabric- they are separate cut out fabric pieces. 

This took a long time.  The  light purple triangles inside the dark blue triangles are also all cut out.  Lots of tiny pieces, all fused in place.

As is typical with my art projects (teachers hated me for this), I finished early. I was able to put a border on my quilt and call it done. 

Now I just have to decide if I want to add hand embroidery (I'm not sure- I can't think of what to do with it) and also to quilt it (also need how to do this).  I also need to figure out a binding. I don't have any of the kit fabric left in the dark colors, and I think the light wouldn't look great for binding.  Maybe I'll just do black. 

It was a FABULOUS day. Wish I was retired and could do more of the workshops.