Friday, August 03, 2007

Laura Wasilowski Class

This last Saturday, I got to take a class from Laura Wasilowski, dean of the Chicago School of Fusing. My quilt group CQFA held the class, with a great turnout from old and new members.
It was a really great class, and I was happy to learn so much about fusing from such a good teacher. Plus, she sings!

Laura is the owner of ArtFabrik, where she sells her hand-dyed threads and fabrics. I splurged on some lovely threads seen above.

She really knows fusing! I have never worked with this much fusible at once before. I used two yards of Wonder Under. It was quite fun to work with the lovely hand-dyes that Laura provides as part of the class kit.
This is the leftover from the class, including the scraps (which are fusible backed), fusible backed fabric, some of her dyed thread, and my official Chicago School of Fusing badge, yay! Guess I'll have to make at least one more little quilt with all this material that is ready to go.
Here is my version of one of the exercises she had us do, to practice cutting out shapes on the fused fabric. It is like making your own patterned fabric in a sense.


Next, we got to cut strips with the fancy cutting blades on our rotary cutters. Between us, Jaye and I had pinking, wavy, and deckle. I think it looks pretty cool. You have to press really hard to cut the fabric though. Then we assembled it all, overlapping and fused it down to make our own fabric.

Then it was time for lunch, all this fun makes one quite hungry. After a healthy salad, a trip to the 7-11 down the block was in order. And lo and behold it was transformed into a Kwik-E-Mart. And they didn't have slurpees, oh no, they had Squishies!! As a very long time Simpsons fan, I was pretty psyched.

I hope that explains my final composition to other Simpson's fans.

The next day I got to go see the Simpsons Movie with my family. Oh boy was it ever funny. I was worried they would try to "movie it up". But nope, it was just like a super long extended regular ol' Simpsons tv show. Go see it if you like the Simpson at all.

Here is what I'd look like if I was a character on the Simpsons. You can make an avatar like this at the movie website.

2 comments:

Karoda said...

I'm probably the only American who has never watched a complete episode of the Simpsons but I do love the quilt and I think its funny as I can identify with the need for a quick junk food fix.

Anonymous said...

Well, as a Simpson's fan from the beginning I say....waaayyyyy cool! Saw the movie opening day and loved it!

I just ordered a bunch of Laura's threads a few days ago but had them shipped to my Michigan home so I won't get to them until September....

teri