Shrinky, Stretchy is a new course Barb is teaching. This is a class for the Improv challenged as well as the Improv experts (as if there are any!). A well designed palette of colours will help you bring many concepts of design to life as you improvise, stretch, shrink and play with traditional quilt blocks. A small quilt top will come to life by day’s end. Come to class with an open mindedness to explore and discover new design ideas. View more photos

From Barb’s website:
I have been making quilts since I took my first sampler class in 1990. That sampler was small and yellow and very bright and was my first improvisational quilt, because I’m not always good at following instructions. I gave it to my best friend when she had her first child.

It was worn to pieces by her two babies and that makes me feel happy. I’ve wandered through many quilt making styles since then, and taken many different directions. I used to make pointy points and repeat blocks in traditional styles (using not so traditional colours) but now I cut free hand and improvise my designs as I go. I used to love collecting fabrics and working with vibrant prints (and I always considered the quilts I made with these to be collaborations with those anonymous fabric designers), but now I mostly work with solid chunks of colour. I used to pay close attention to colour relationships, working out how the colours reacted together by consulting my colour wheel and studying different traditional “schemes”, but now I pay close attention to my gut reaction to colour and design. I am training my eye to see good relationships in colour, value, line and shape. It’s a hard slog sometimes, but getting the cloth to sing is what keeps me in the studio. It’s just that simple.

DATE: November 14, 2015
TIME: 9:30 am to 4:00 pm
LOCATION: Gloria Dei Lutheran Church, 1110 Gladwin Drive, North Vancouver
COST: $45.00 per person