Thursday at VQF

One highlight of my year is always the Vermont Quilt Festival, now held at St. Michael's College and the Champlain Valley Expo in Essex Junction. When it was in Northfield, I could zip over every day for a while, but now it's an hour each way. It is worth it, though. I love the airconditioned classrooms and exhibit hall, and the space for more displays and vendors.

Thursday, I left home at 6:45 am (reminiscent of my working life!) so that I could register and find my classroom. I took a day-long workshop on creative log cabin diamonds with Flavin Glover who turned out to be a soft-spoken Alabama woman who hand-quilts all of her pieces. She had lots of examples to share and templates that we could photocopy and use. She also had project sheets to color on which I later found helpful in making my log cabin tumbling blocks table topper.

We could choose to make either log cabin stars or tumbling blocks. Both start with a diamond, but the stars build all the way around it, while the tumbling blocks build on two sides. All use strips cut 1.25" but the diamonds use a 1.5" center. I chose to make the table topper because I was hoping to finish by the end of class. And I did, pretty much. There were some blips due to my cutting and sewing the 1/4" seam, but it will be a nice sample for the future.

I have Flavin's earlier book on pictorial quilts using log cabin squares, and she was happy to autograph it. I hope to start working on a star quilt soon although yesterday I was completely involved in putting together the blocks from the Heart of Vermont guild's "square robin" along with some others I had made during the year. It uses Civil War reproduction fabrics, so it's quite a change from the fabrics I took to class. I need to make 11 more blocks before it's ready to put the rows together, but I made good headway. And I have plenty more fabric from that era to do some piecing on the back.

This afternoon, I'm going to help at the Vermont Historical Society booth, and (finally!) Sunday morning, Polly and I will go over to the show to see the quilts and shop the vendors.