The Beginning

This is the quilt I made in the first Nancy Crow workshop that I took in 1985. I have been telling people that it was in 1984 but I just went to the album from the workshop and found my mistake. The workshop was held at Clarke College in Dubuque, Iowa. I saw the notice in a magazine and called immediately for a place in the workshop. They told me it was filled. I replied that even if they called me the night before I would be there. They called me 2 nights before and said they had a cancellation. I was overjoyed because from the minute I had seen the first Nancy Crow quilt in Quilter's Newsletter, I knew I had to meet her and learn from her.

This workshop setting was the first time I had ever worked on a vertical design surface. We were each handed a 4'x4' piece of wallboard, the heavy kind, to pin our pieces to. When we were ready to leave, hardly anyone had a door opening or trunk big enough to fit the wallboard into. Luckily I had a 1980 Chrysler towncar and I just barely squeezed it in.

The colors are a little more vivid than in this photo, a little more orange but I wasn't able to adjust it to my satisfaction. I had just finished teaching a series of Amish quilt classes so I had the required selection of solid colors on hand. The name of this workshop was "Exploration of Strip Piecing in Contemporary Quiltmaking" with a lecture the preceeding evening entitled "Contemporary Quitmaker, My Own Experience". These 3 days were the beginning of my art quilting career. Even though I continued to teach traditional quilting, the excitement of designing and experimenting were taking over my life.