February 2003

This month I am writing from Columbia, South Carolina on my first long teaching trip of the year. It is colder here than I anticipated—imagine my shock when I overheard conversations last night in the plane about the "dusting of snow" that was likely to be here by morning!! Having grown up on the east coast, I know that "dusting of snow" could mean "the snow dump of the year" if it is near February or March!!! Oh well, I'm headed for Florida in two days—surely there will be no danger of snow in Tampa or Miami...

	While staying at my sister Janet's I had to sew a sleeve in her sewing room for a Christmas quilt we were going to hang at Mom and Dad's. Here I am trying to sew with her rather odd assortment of tools: a small wheel rotary cutter and a plastic (not acrylic) straightedge. How she EVER sewed the wonderful quilt she made for her oldest son (the entire quilt was made of backed teeshirt fabric! H-E-A-V-Y!! ), on that old sewing machine, I'll never know...Boy, gift buying for her is going to be easy for the next year or two...I may be able to shop for a lot of them in my own studio, giving her duplicates of my decent and appropriate tools and gadgets...

December began with a week-long visit to my family in Maryland. What a joy, and what a wonderful early start to the holiday season! My parents and three siblings with their families live within a half-hour driving distance of each other, so I rent a car and have special visits with each family—so much better than a huge family gathering in a shorter visit, when one can't really talk at length with anyone! How family situations change, as some nieces and nephews are away at college and military service; and it is always a shock to see how the "little ones", high school age and younger, have grown. It is always humbling to see how fast they grow taller than I am...

These holidays, the first in my new house, were full of contacts with friends both old and new. What a delight and a wonder that I feel not only so settled but really "nested" on the Kitsap Peninsula. Despite my travel schedule this past year I've consciously tried to build a community of friends from different walks of life here, and apparently my efforts were most fruitful! And they have resulted in much more than I bargained for, in that I've just been elected as a member of the YWCA Board of Directors!! Ah, new experiences! New ways of giving back to the community!

There is much to enjoy during the holidays in the Northwest—and since both of my boys were with me for at least a part of Christmas Day, my holiday was complete! Though my son David had quite a challenge flying out of the Newark, NJ airport to come home for the holidays, home he managed to come! He missed the tour of the Christmas ships and the Open House at a friend's recently remodeled and enchanting home; but we did get to the Museum of Glass in Tacoma (on a Monday! When it was closed!!), to a Seattle Men's Chorus concert (a holiday favorite of ours), to some stage shows, downtown Seattle for holiday shopping and art gallery browsing and enjoying the holiday lights, and most of all, had time for lots of wonderful conversations. David is in his final "push" of graduate school, getting ready to direct his Master's play at Rutgers the end of February. I plan to frequent flier myself there for Opening Night...And will prepare to have my heart burst with pride...Then back to NJ in May for his commencement, as he gets his Master of Fine Arts in Directing. And there is more good news yet—he will be back in Seattle this summer, directing a play for Seattle Children's Theater! Ah, blessings!

The biggest news on the business front is that thanks to Linda's and Carol's efforts, I now have credit card sales capability for books and templates on the road and on the website! A Herculean effort, to be sure—and I just stayed out of the way and watched the process in awe! Thank you, Linda! Thank you, Carol!!! Also new to the website this month are downloadable quilt images that guilds and shops can use to publicize my upcoming lectures and workshops.

And if that weren't enough, after Christmas my nose went right to the grindstone and the two new quilts in the New Work section resulted! Actually, the "Season 8 Sampler" was in pieces on the wall and largely ready to sew as the holidays approached—but it was such a big quilt that it still took some time to get together! Wanda Rains (whose machine quilting business in Kingston, WA is called "Rainy Day Quilts") did a magnificent job of custom-quilting it for me. But the smaller quilt was designed, assembled, and quilted (by me) from after Christmas, then it was shipped the day before this trip!!!

One of the most fascinating parts of the experimental classes is putting the very first exercise up on the board: the blocks that the students create out of certain template shapes. They draw a six-inch square on a piece of white paper, and I tell them, for example, "make a block out of 4 A's and 4 H's"—and the results are amazing! What is even more amazing is to put four photocopies of these blocks together into either a larger block, or a small wall hanging. By rotating the blocks in place, amazing quilt designs can result. Sometimes the most awkward-looking single blocks make the most dramatic quilts, as a four-block assemblage!

My first trip of the year was to Anacortes, a three-hour trip from home (part of which is the ferry ride, of course!). At The Quilt Shop there, I taught two more two-day experimental AnglePlay classes. Anacortes is a good half-way point for both Canadian and Washington quiltmakers to meet! Many of these students had been in my experimental classes before, and they are a delight to work with—wonderful quiltmakers all, and always ready for a quiltmaking challenge...What a joy to watch students go in so many different directions with this half-rectangle triangle shape! I now believe more than ever that this AnglePlay triangle is going to be the next classic shape for pieced quilts, after the squares and half-square triangles we have known and loved for so many years!!!

The second experimental class in Anacortes, hard at work the second day. L-R, facing camera: Diana Johnston, Diane Beacham, Dale MacEwan, Ionne McCaulay, Judie Hansen. (back to camera, Sharon Pederson). This particular class went more different design directions on the second day than any class I've had to date...What a delight to watch them interacting, and zooming ahead with their ideas...

Next month, in lieu of the AnglePlay challenge class, there will be photos of exciting quilts which have been generated so far in the three experimental classes I've taught in Washington! The first class, which was held in Poulsbo in September, has already had two reunions, and those students will join us in mid-February at the first reunion of the Anacortes groups! What a creative explosion there will be!!!!

Patsi Hanseth of Mount Vernon, WA at the end of the second day, showing the fabrics she plans to use to flesh out her lively heart quilt! Many of us took pictures of her because of her cute cat sweater as well as her glorious quilt...