Kathy Wagner workshop

I had the wonderful privilege of taking a workshop on Miniature Quilts taught by Kathy Wagner yesterday. What fun we had. I'm looking at garbage in a whole new way. I actually saved the trimmings from my tiny half square triangles and am looking for a glass jar to store them in. Wow, are we crazy or what eh? I will say with McDonald's "I'm lovin it" LOL.

Kathy had suggested bringing along scraps leftover from another quilt. What a great idea. I will be storing some of my leftovers in ziplock baggies. Maybe I'll find a pretty basket to store them and keep it beside my sewing machine for instant mini gratification when I need something fun and small to work on.

I actually took Kathy's class about 7 years ago when I lived in Hamilton for a couple of years when DH went back to school to get his B Ed. degree. These are the four quilts that I made after that workshop:

This one was done with strip pieced paper piecing:

This is the same block, but arranged differently:

Here is Kathy starting us out with instructions and hints on sewing with these tiny pieces, thread to use, needles that work, etc. We also got a thick stack of pages of web sites, patterns and ideas to take home. My head was spinning with new ideas. I love making mini quilts and this is only going to make it worse :-).


I decided to challenge my self and make 6 mini tulip blocks consisting of 16 tiny little 1/4" finished squares, some of which are half square triangles!! They were made with 1 1/4" squares and then trimmed down to 3/4"..wow, those were tiny! And, that produced the trimmings which are going into the above mentioned jar :-). Here are my pieces all marked and lined up to start sewing:

You can hardly pick up these pieces!! Tweezers may have come in handy:

The first half square triangle:

Voila...by the end of the day I got three little blocks done, the pieces cut and all the half square triangles made to piece the last three:

And, I thought my 2" one block wonder hexagons were small to work with!!!

One of my quilt students dropped by this morning and I showed her the three little tulip blocks on my wall I made yesterday. Her response: "Why?" Now, that's a really good question Danielle, and it kept me pondering all morning while I was doing my housework. Why do we do these crazy things? I can think of a few reasons:

#1 It's good to challenge ourselves to think (and do) outside the box.
#2 It keeps me off the streets and out of mischief :-)
#3 Kathy dared us!
#4 It's just plain fun to see if something can actually be done.
#5 The actual little quilt (when I get it finished) will look very cute somewhere in my sewing room.
#6 .......I'm sure there are more reasons.......