The Art of Fabric Collage Workshop Report

Today's workshop teacher - Wendy Ward of Carmel Valley, California






Twenty EQ members had color and fabric flying today in the bright sunny community room of Grace Episcopal church. Excitement was palpable as we set up our stations and delightedly spread out our seemingly endless rainbows of fabric.

Meanwhile, teacher Wendy Ward arrived from California on the 9:25 a.m. ferry and was quickly whisked to the village by Mom -- Barbara Gonce. Wendy was here to visit Barb and to lead a workshop exploring the art of fabric collage and to show us examples of her own recent creative exploration in perspective. Wendy, a scientist by profession, working part-time at Monterey Bay Aquarium and part-time at Back Porch Fabrics in Pacific Grove, was an excellent teacher.

The by-word of the day was to explore and "play" –– beyond one's own comfort zones.

Each quilter had pre-purchased Susan Carolson's book Free Style Quilts: A "No Rules" Approach and had dug thru her stash for days, looking for appropriate fabrics for our own project as well as fabrics to share.


Some had even met ahead of time to "interview" fabrics from one another's stashes.








To this reporter the selection and variety students had to "play" with and "borrow" at today's workshop was astounding.












(below) Barbara Carver and Carolyn Baldwin contemplate and concentrate.



















In this writer's opinion it was even more astounding to see how different each project turned out to be, even though we were all creating basically the same large fish.


Take a look for yourself.




Darlene Demetrick is just getting started. Unfortunately, I didn't get finished snapshots at the end of the class of all the projects but I'll get photos of all eventually and put them on the blog. Darlene had completed hers by the end of the day, ready for the next step of attaching it to the background fabric.





Laurie Latta told us hers turned out to be a very feminine FEMALE fish!








Anne Dawson's was a bold daring fish ready for a Caribbean adventure!

























Hopefully we'll eventually be able to have he finished product on display somewhere here on Lopez before the year is out.


This day's post will have to be completed tomorrow. I'm ready to crash! It's 12:32 a.m. and I am having too much fun for so late at night!

Karen Alexander
Historian for Enchanted Quilters of Lopez Island