8 Racks of Ribs and a Metal Working Class

 (I will link this up to Nina Marie's Off the Wall Friday)

My cousin Jason and his wife and their together 5 kids all flew in from Colorado and will convene at 
Carrie's house tomorrow.  I make the most incredible ribs so they wanted my ribs.  Thinking ahead, I gave the recipe to Carrie with instructions NOT to give it out to anyone.  And she was supposed to make my ribs.  She did a practice run two weeks ago and pronounced them not nearly as good as mine.  Hmmmmmmm.

So the job went back to me.  Of course, what would you expect from a person who gets her mother and mother-in-law to make Thanksgiving dinner!  That's OK, I get to keep the title of the Best Ribs Ever!

So now that 4 racks of the magnificent rib slabs are in the oven and the other 4 are ready to pop in in 2 hours I can tell you about my incredible day in the Metal Working workshop.

I took pictures all day, just for you!

Mary Hettsmansperger has been in all the major and minor magazines, she has been juried into SAQA and so many other places we all admire.

Michael and I sat at a table together and he made fun of my tool kit.  He called it Sissy tools, I call them ZEBRA!

This was the array of metals she gave us to manipulate.  Copper of several weights, brass, the hemp is mine and somehow got into the photo.  Some of the metals were thick and some were so thin they draped like fabric.  You can sew through about half of these babies.

We used butane burners with self starters.  Our Mary who set up the
classes, was paranoid the whole time that someone was going to burn the building down!

Here is a copper foil with flux.  It becomes almost iridescent in places. 

 Here are some copper sheets cut, fluxed, burned and beaten with hammers.  The coil is a steel wire beaten to within an inch of its life with a mallet head that had patterns embedded in it.



This is a copper mesh burned.  Half of it is original.

And here we wove a thin copper foil with basket weaving materials.  We WOVE metal!






We burned batting (outside) and we put embossing powder on metals and burned them.

 This is a metal sheet that has been sewn through using a regular sewing machine like we all have in our sewing room! 

These are some of the things I burned, beat and made.

 

 

Do you remember the leaves I skeletonized?   they are just perfect here!  

Mary H discharges dark fabrics, dyes light fabrics and Rusts amazing things easily.

I want to be her!  I do so want to be her!

 

The Best of QuiltCon

I have some other things to add to the down side of QuiltCon but I wanted to include some good and great things first.

I knew there would not be 5 days worth of vendors or show quilts to keep me busy so I wanted to take classes from some people we don't have around Louisiana.  It was very smart.  The best one of the whole show was Compositional Drawing with Krista Withers. 

It was a 3 hour workshop in the Conference Center upstairs.  No homeless to stop me here!  Krista spent most of the time on the floor with us gathered around.  Of course she is a 20 something with good knees still!  And I loved the long sweater she had on, it was so me!

She was giving of her information without referring us to any book to purchase.  I have to admire that.  It was clear that others were interested in selling their books and patterns so they would give constant references to the books so you would have the purchase to get the information you needed to fully understand what they were talking about.

She was encouraging even though she was presenting a totally different way of looking at a quilt for the quilting designs.  I felt excited as she made it seem easy.

There was adequate time for us to play with the design framework, which was lacking in the other class I had.  Not the dyeing class, we had a lot of time to play as it was an all day workshop!  And the experience we gained with the practice made it something we could go home and do ourselves.

So that covers the two workshops I took.  Dyeing with Kim Messmer and Quilting with Krista Withers.

The other workshop I had was supposed to be Backfills with Lisa Sipes.  And that was the material list I brought.  What I had when I got to the Center that day was Getting It Straight with Cristy Fincher.  Her claim to fame was that she was the daughter of Sharon Shambler.  Nice for her, but she and her mother made a ton of money on the workshop by charging everyone $30 for a 20 x 20 piece of muslin with batting. 

She then proceeded to show us how to sew a straight line with a mid arm sit down machine.  Something I don't have and will not get anytime soon.  I can do straight line very well thank you.

I was not given a chance to refuse this workshop which cost me $149.00.  The worst part about it was that I had to explain to and teach the person I shared the machine with everything since she had only been sewing for 3 months!

Why was she even in the  class?  Maybe like me she was thrown in there from a beginner sewing class.  She certainly did not come from the Backfills class, huh?