The Material Girls!

Last weekend I had the pleasure of teaching for a private group of 17 women in Ukiah, California, known as The Material Girls. 

One of their members owns a large 300+ acre vineyard and turned an old warehouse into a HUGE quilting studio/classroom .  On the other side of the "studio" is a large guest home that overlooks the vineyard.  I know, I know...life is rough sometimes.  This is the view from the dining room of the guest home where I stayed for three days.  Somebody has to do it, right????   :)

At first I thought this was a "store" of sorts...fabric for sale.  Nope...this is her stash!  Meticulously organized and categorized.

This is the sewing room part of the building...there is yet another room for the lectures. 

And then there were these amazing stained glass windows in the doors at the end of the sewing area.  Beautiful!!!

This is what I REALLY wanted to share with you...on the first night I gave a small lecture on The Ultimate Stencils and had a small exercise in designing.  I instructed everyone to draw a simple eight pointed star using the stencils so they could learn how to use the angled lines and circles to create a perfect star every time.  What I didn't expect is everyone coming up with a different star!  I was amazed.  Here are just a few of the designs that were created using these stencils...

This was part of a sampler created using beautiful hand dyed fabrics...

This is another sampler in the works...this space used the triangles/diamonds from The Ultimate Backgrounds.  I LOVE how she filled the spaces with cathedral windows and a swirl.  The twisted grid was used for the upper right circle, triple lines for the background and baby clams for the bottom right hand corner. 

This is a photo of a piece just getting started...she  used the diamonds/triangles background stencil for this narrow strip.  Great idea for filling in a long narrow space. 



I want to thank this special group of ladies for such an amazing weekend of inspiration!


Hugs, Cindy :)