long arm quilting with natalia bonner

a handful of months ago, it was mentioned at one of our quilt guild meetings that a professional quilter would be offering classes at meissners in september.  i jumped online when i got home and registered myself for two out of the three classes being offered.

to be honest i knew nothing about Natalia Bonner at all, but i was excited for the opportunity to take some classes from a different instructor.  plus, every time i have gone in to use the long arm, i have steered myself away from thinking about free motion, and just stuck with pantographs.  the two classes i took were called "beginner's guide to free motion quilting" and "creative background fillers."  i opted out of taking "visual guide to machine quilting feathers" because i didn't feel like feathers were something that would interest me (since then, i've signed up for Angelina's feathers & swirls class in december)

i feel like with these classes i learned a good handful of things, but overall i feel a lot more confident in my free motion quilting.  when i took my initial certification class nearly a year ago, i felt very overwhelmed and put crazy expectations on myself.  plus, i was paired with someone who used to own her own long arm.  talk about intense!  now, almost a year later, i feel like i have a better grasp on the concepts of it, and enjoy it WAY more than when i did it on my home machine.  currently, i have one quilt that i do plan to free motion, just have to figure out what design will work best!

here's a look at some of my practice chunks, forever immortalized in blog format :)
day 1: beginner's guide to free motion quilting
day 2: creative background fillers
there are a few motifs that i'm excited to use from these classes.
i particularly like the wood grain from the first day, and i think that would look great on a baby boy quilt of sorts.  i really like the dense all over squares (did them both days) as well as the crackle looking one.  i think the crackle will look great on my pumpkin quilt, so hopefully i can get a move on that to make it happen!  surprisingly i didn't hate doing the swirls as much as i thought i would, and it was great to have angelina there to hang out with on the second day of classes!  i'm ready to get long arm quilting again, and will very likely be trying a free motion style when i am working on one of my projects :)

fearless fills and frills - free motion quilting class

finally catching up on talking about my free motion quilting class!
i have to say, i quite enjoyed this one.  the class had about 6 of us in it, which was nice.  the experience level was mixed, from ladies who had been doing fmq on their machine forever, to people like myself who had just taken the one class.  this class really built on the last one, giving us the next level of where to go.  we stitched ferns, strings of pearls and shells as border pieces.
here's the entirety of the first block we stitched on.
we started with the fern by stitching the middle section, then doing the right fronds (bottom portion) and the the left (top).  jenny lyon, our instructor, mentioned right handed people usually have a tougher time on the "left" side, but i actually found that size easier to stitch.
the shells were pretty easy, having done the double drip previously.  getting the angle right was a little tricky, that's for sure.  also, the string of pearls were... okay.  perfect circles aren't my jam really, but neither is things in straight lines.  i much prefer the "all over" look of things.  these all look too organized for my personal quilting style.
these two were a little more my style for sure.  the cute little scallop hills were fun.  some a little wider than others, but it gave them a bit of character for sure.  i REALLY like the one next to it, which she called stacked bananas.  just a bunch of looping back and forth, changing directions whenever felt fit.  this one was also very similar to the double drip from the first class... which might be why i liked it so much.
the other one i didn't get a closer up one of this jenny gave a different name, but i know it is called orange peel.  it requires a grid, which adds time to the project, but it was a nice little stitching motif.  it could be fun to do bigger as well, so that could be a potential for the future.
these second two were interesting as well.  the first one on the left was basically breaking the quilting in to chunks and essentially just echoing the lines zoned out.  almost like a topographic map... at least i think that is the name that i remember from earth science.  anyways, the second one is swirls and bubbles.  this one was a cute motif, but i had a bit of a struggle to get my swirls to lay the right way to not look funky.  the little bubbles helped balance things out for sure.
things i took away from this class:
more motifs.  obviously.
learned about using things as borders.  not sure if this is something i'll use, but i know how to do it now!
benefits of gloves/something grippy.  now, i'm the only one who showed up to class without gloves, but it wasn't required so i wasn't being a rebel.  having long fingers anyways, i have a hard time buying gloves because they really don't fit.  i did borrow some hand grip things from jenny, from a brand called "the steady betty."  these "betty bands"seemed to do the job awesomely, and i didn't have to worry about my fingers being the right length (or not, in reality).  should i see more fmq becoming a constant thing in my sewing future, i will likely invest in a pair of these.  next time i end up at meissner's, i'll also likely look for a straight stitch plate for my machine.  i heard it does wonders for piecing as well.
and there you have it!  part of me wishes that i did my 21 day practice after this class because it would have given me more motifs to practice, but i can also see how that would also be overwhelming.  oh the struggle!  i believe meissner's offers one more free motion quilting class that i am debating taking, so hang tight to see if that happens.  in the mean time, i'll be working on catching up blogging and block piecing so be sure to pop by my instagram to see what is happening :)

day 24:30 - 30 day challenge

day 24: something you've learned
apparently i've decided to go literal with this one.
in high school, i put off any sort of foreign language classes.  it was an either/or situation for graduation requirements between foreign language and fine arts...  well, i had fine arts credits out the wazoo with all the band & winter guard stuff i did so i pushed it off to college.  i didn't want to take spanish or french anyways, which were the two languages del oro offered at the time.  i wanted to take ASL (american sign language) and so that's what i did.  my teacher was deaf, which made it a little difficult, but i guess that's true immersion right?  i took asl 2 with a hearing professor who was fantastic.  her class was entertaining and interesting, which really helped the learning process.  my downfall was my third semester of ASL.  I was all game and ready to go for it, but the professor I had for the class was just not my cup of tea.  he was older and deaf, and his personality was a little gruff i guess you could say.  that semester was a bit harder... we had video recorded finals, and did this weird model home project that i'm still not sure what it had to to with sign language at all since it was completely power point.  very odd.  i also took a classifiers class from him that semester, which was like a side course of different ASL things.
sad to say, i really don't remember much from those classes besides the basics.  i can pick up a few things here and there when my aunt signs things - like when she said she was looking for a green shirt across the noisy dance studio the other week - but i don't think i could hold a full conversation with anyone.  at least not at this point.  so maybe i'll brush up on it sometime.  maybe i'll refresh my memory.  regardless, i am glad for the experience that i had learning ASL those semesters at sierra college.  while it may not be as useful in the "real world" at this moment as knowing spanish would be, my experience learning it was great, and i would not have changed it for anything.
two movies i really enjoyed from the classes:
beyond silence
mr. holland's opus
and the not text book we read:
deaf like me