Saturday Night Sampler

While in Chicago, Jason and I attended the Saturday Night Sampler. We learned all sorts of things. The sampler on Saturday night included 14 different exhibitors. Each exhibitor was given a table to set up their displays and there were several chairs lined up so the attendees could sit for a five minute presentation by the exhibitor. Each attendee was given a packet of handouts from each instructor so they could take notes and have a good reminder of what was presented.

A woman named Marilyn Doheny did a little lecture about Tantalizing Tango! Here are some of the displays she had at her table.
The quilt in the borders and the fan to its left were both made using the same beginning strip.

You can make butterflies using her method.

The strip in the top right of the photo is the strip that she made first. She then used the special ruler to slice it and create the quilt in the photo. Pretty cool, eh?

She was a lot of fun to listen to. It was almost like watching a really excited infomercial seller. By using her special rulers and shifting them a certain way across your already made rows, you can end up with one of these sort of quilts.

Debbie Caffrey did a little demonstration on how to do perfect & painless half-square triangles. I enjoyed her presentation and thought her method was so awesome, I bought her book Becoming A Confident Quilter: Perfect and Painless Half-Square Triangle Units and a 4" square rotary ruler. Her website can be found here.

One of the other presentations we sat through was by Darcy Berg on Painting Fabric. She did a quick demonstration on how to paint your fabric using Setacolor paint. It was a pretty neat little demonstration and I learned quite a bit. She showed us how to dilute the paint, apply it to the fabric and mentioned a few different things you can do to get a different effect. Did you know if you put salt on the fabric before you paint it, you get little spot marks? You can find her blog here.

We sat through the lecture by Nancy Brenan Daniel on how to stencil and applique quilts. It was pretty cool. It's amazing how much you can do with a stencil and get it to look like an appliqued quilt. She had an example quilt there that had been stenciled, feathered, and appliqued. Did you know pen-stitching is when you draw a dashed line along the edge of a stenciled image and it looks like you stitched it with thread? It turns out really bold. You can find her website here.

The last demonstration we watched was by Glennis Dolce. It was called the Stitched Manipulation of Pleated Shibori Ribbon. This ribbon was pretty neat. She did a demo where she made a flower out of the ribbon. It was really cool to see the way the ribbon opened up as she stitched it. You can visit her website here to see what exactly shibori is.

So that's a quick recap of one of the events we attended while in Chicago. Check back tomorrow for a website I discovered while in Chicago.

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