Stash busting in Etobicoke.

In early December the Etobicoke Quilters Guild invited me to hold a stash busting workshop.   The studio space at Neilson Park is fantastic and bright with lots of elbow room.  The thing I love about these workshops is meeting the women (and men), hearing their story and seeing their character come thru in what they produce.

On the left is my original stash busting quilt, all low volume, it was started by hand with my mom,  that is a long story for another time.  When I was originally approached to teach this quilt, I was a little embarrassed because it is such an easy technique, to me it seemed I could put my feet up on my sewing table and phone in the instructions.  I decided to make it a workshop with many ways to use the technique, sort of “thinking outside the box”.  I give  about 10 different ways to make your quilt, but in every workshop we come up with more new ideas.

 

 

 

The next version I worked on was a bar quilt using old stash in one colour family, I added a  grey background and border and lots of quilting to  give it a very modern look.

 

 

Back to the workshop where the design wall filled up quickly.  Everybody’s taste in fabric and colour is individual.   Some participants need a little pop of colour added to their stash,  while others were running out of the colour family they choose to work in.  There was the usual fabric trading  and design idea consulting, can you see the secondary design forming in the red strips?

Some participants choose to work in long strips with a definite colour palette.  Everyone was very productive and learned a little about how to approach their stash. It was a great day all around and I hope to see some of the results soon.

 

Here is a sneak peak of my next quilt using this technique.