On the Road: Empty Spools Seminars 2019, Fabric Collage Class Part 2

Two weeks ago, I posted Part 1 of this year’s travel and teaching for Empty Spools Seminars. I left you as I was heading of to the second week’s class after a short respite on Asilomar beach, next to Asilomar Conference Grounds where classes, lodging, and dining are held in Pacific Grove, California. I was thoroughly enjoying the (as it turned out, only) sunny day and the few hours between classes. But in entering the classroom, there there was a whole new batch of smiling faces, six of them were familiar from past classes, four of them are pictured below.

These four friends are (left to right): Beth Shay, Juliet Sandquist, Judy Crotts, and Linda Roberts.

Beth’s quilt, “Miss Crabcakes at the Beach,” opened this post—brought back from her 2017 Asilomar class to get some glitter tulle and cropping opinions. Take a moment to look closer at Miss Crabcakes. You’ll see that there’s a whole crustacean army quilted into the sand. Plus, Beth’s readily available cropping tool is nicked from the loo—rolls of disposable white “paper strips”—a tip provided by another teacher of hers, Jane Sassaman, in a previous class.

In the same 2017 class was Juliet, returning with her dog Cajun’s portrait (above). The photo was taken at the end of the week—Juliet’s goal had been to get Cajun onto a background and ready for quilting, which she accomplished. Funny thing was, that great pieced border and it’s black interior, was a UFO (unfinished object). We all agreed that it worked perfectly for Cajun, and with the additions of a few well-chosen and placed rectangles, the background was done. “Remembering Cajun” is now quilted and submitted into a quilt show, and will be included in next week’s Finish Line blog post, so be sure to look for him and read Juliet has shared about the collage process.

As Juliet was finishing the quilt, she sent:

What a whirlwind week! I really don’t know when I’ve enjoyed a better time. Having you, plus three best friends at Asilomar was quite an amazing experience. Thank you! After we got home, I read the quilt show info packet for label and sleeve directions and discovered a loophole (yay!)—Cajun can be turned in on May 25th for judging and the show. So, I’m still working on him! Thank you for all the constructive suggestions! I promise a photo when I finish. He is looking good. I’m excited to try some free motion ideas for the quilting. What a journey this has been for me! I’ll send some pictures and a little bit about the process of selecting lots and lots of brown fabric for my chocolate Labrador retriever who playfully morphed into a much more colorful creature.

One of the last two of this featured friend group are Judy Crotts, above with pets-in-progress, Riki and Carlos. If Judy looks familiar, it’s because Judy has turned into a “regular” in my blog posts this past year—Asilomar 2018, Road to California Quilt Show Special, and last week’s Asilomar Show-and-Share post—all including the quilt of her grandson Corbin, another large-scaled subject with beautiful eyes.

And below is the beginning of Linda Roberts’ pup portrait of Curly the English Setter. Linda had been in a 2-day class a couple years ago, collaging a fish. Prior to class she emailed me about subject matter and her excitement shown through the words.

I’m thrilled our subject matter for this class is animals! I am an animal lover having owned dogs, cats, horses, ponies, chickens, ducks, rats, parakeets, etc …. along with Oliver the Wonder Goat! I narrowed down to two candidates … the first, my very special English setter who crossed the rainbow bridge in October. (His official color is called blue belton—so I could easily incorporate blues in his black, white, grey mix – though you might suggest adding all kinds of color … it’s art!! Right? Lol I need to learn to embrace stepping out of the “literal” box) He was a wonderful companion, endearingly devoted to me through some rough seasons in my life. His stories/shenanigans were followed by many on Facebook! He was the infamous banana stealer – such a character and very photogenic!

Linda’s second candidate was a horse, but I liked her story of Curly so I suggested she start with him. I also thought the mottled color and fur texture would be more fun to work with. I liked that she was thinking about color alternatives, and she did give him a blue nose and started getting some blue fabrics worked into his fur. And set aside for later, was a banana print fabric to work into the background, somehow.

Now to meet the rest of the class—pictured left to right: back row—Juliet Sandquist, Joyce Lytle, Marcia Hamilton, Cheryl Hack, Donna Greenwald, Laura Schmidhammer, Beth Shay, and Judy Crotts; seated on chairs—Bev Agler, Mary Ellen Janes, Judy Spellman, Linda Dixon, Margaret De Palma, and Terry Loy; seated on floor—Suzette Bowen, Lisa Brothman, Ruby Tabata, Trina Wagner, and Sarah Mikolavich; and lounging in front—Linda Roberts, and me.

So many of these ladies were in the classroom early every morning, many worked through lunchtime, and the creative fires were burning every evening too. They progressed so quickly that I missed getting beginning project photos for quite a few of them. Enjoy the colorful menagerie that follows.

Student In-Progress Slideshow

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In the student slideshow, this lime green rhino may have caught your eye. Bev Agler did some great work with the fun color, prints, visual texture, and contours found in her fabrics, but she also came to class with her rhino photo pre-printed onto a fabric foundation. It certainly stands out as different among the other line-drawn images and in-progress photos.

I wasn’t sure how this would work for her, the realistic colors of the photo transfer could easily have been a distraction from Bev’s ability to mentally “translate” the browns to lime green. She was willing to give it a try, so why not? I’m not ready to recommend it as a regular approach to fabric collage, but it’s a different one, and that’s ok. And as shown in the final class photo above, Bev did just fine, and I look forward to seeing the finished fellow.

As I made my rounds through the class, a cute pincushion caught my attention (there was a sea turtle the previous week), Suzette Bowen’s little grey mouse kept a close eye on the progress of her butterfly, above.

Hiding in a class demo sample (below), was a small “gift” for me to find, tucked in place by a student in the first week’s class—novelty cat and sexy firemen fabric scraps found in the “Piano Pile.” Hmmm, I wonder who did that…, Rochelle?

And then, as I prep this blog post, another cat appears in a detail photo I took during class, below. Did I notice it then? Actually, no. These classes make me smile, even after they’re over.

Like I mentioned, these ladies worked hard and really got into their projects—literally, in the case of Terry Loy and her fish with the fanciful tail, above.

As the week progresses, I love to see a fabric messiness spread over the tables and spill onto the floor. This class happily obliged.

Laurie (above) was another returning student—a two-timer perfecting her tree frog—and continuing to work even through the class walkthrough at the end of the week.

More end-of-week photos follow below.

And then my time with Empty Spools at Asilomar is over for the year. But the Piano Pile of fabric scraps seems to have grown over the course of the two weeks. Funny how that happens, even with all the perfect pieces that were found by both classes. It gets packed up as well and saved at a friend’s house in Pacific Grove, to be delivered back to class next year.

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And now for the Scenic Photos portion of this travel blog post….

Morning walks along the coast are a given every year. For the second week of teaching, Katie Pasquini Masopust arrived and was quite happy to be back on the beach at Asilomar, below.

Katie’s arrival brought us luck with wildlife sightings. This week we saw deer on the beach, nesting seagulls on the rocks, sea otters, pelicans in flight, porpoise, lots of different shore birds, tiny bunnies, and a beautiful red starfish.

As the shifting time of the tides go, this week was a lower tide during our morning walks, exposing tide pools that merited a bit of exploration.

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Until next year my friends.

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Asilomar is located in the very cute little town of Pacific Grove on the Monterey Peninsula. When I have an extra day or so to spend in the area, as I did this year, I like to check out its small but interesting Museum of Natural History.

This year featured a nature based art exhibit by students from a local college. I’ve included two works below, their stories especially caught my attention. Click on any of the photos to see them larger and read the write-ups provided by the artists.

If as I did, you want to test the validity of a mouse that howls at the moon or a truce between predator and prey in a tortoise burrow, then grab another cuppa and follow these links that I found: a mouse that not only howls at the moon, but eats scorpions that can kill a human, a couple mouse videos including it’s “wolf howl”, species that use gopher tortoise burrows, and five fun facts about gopher tortoises. These were things I did not know about and thought to share them with you. You never know what you can learn in a blog about fabric collage.

Flowers, big ol’ eucalyptus trees, and a cute little garden shop, all found in downtown Pacific Grove, California.

Lest we not forget to eat, this final slide show of the week takes you to some culinary finds in Pacific Grove and Monterey. Thank you Barb and Irv for your hospitality, again.

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