Blue Ridge Beauty with Bonnie Hunter!

My class with Bonnie was this past weekend. It was a long day with driving 80+ minutes there and 110 minutes home since there was a bad truck fire on the expressway. I stopped at Viddler’s, an awesome five and dime in East Aurora but I was so tired, I wandered and left empty handed - not my norm when I get a rare chance to visit Viddler's. When I got home I put my things away and didn’t do much of anything the rest of the weekend. It’s a good thing Zorro made me take that break on Thursday – I could have used him again Friday and Saturday. LOL.

Ummm...that paragraph sounded like a real downer when what I had was a great day. Sorry L

Lots of space for everyone to sew, do demos at the front and 5 ironing stations at the back

 

Class started at 9am on Saturday. I got there about 20 minutes early and looked for free table space since the room was already pretty full. A lot of the students had taken 3 or 4 classes with Bonnie! Many people sat 2 to a table but I was lucky to get a table to myself. Whoo hoo – room to spread out which is nice when strip piecing.

We started with making 4 patches. I think Bonnie finally convinced me to layer the two strips and cut them as pairs without pinning! It worked well in class so it must work at home, right?

The 2-toned green bit on the left is my leaderEnder - a Christmas quilt for one of my nephews.

After lunch there were door prizes from the host guild and then we had show-n-tell back in our class room. I asked Bonnie to pose with me so I could put our picture on the quilt label. I guess I better get the back done so I can quilt this baby and put that label on!

No I don't know who the guy was in the painting behind me.
Class was in a museum and there antiques all over the place.

 

And then we moved on to half square triangles using my near&dear friend the Easy Angle. Bonnie demoed her 2 step method of flipping the EA back and forth but since I taught myself my own 2 step method years ago I just couldn’t get hers to work with any speed. It really didn’t affect my cutting accuracy so I just did it my way and zipped along.

 

Pretty soon we were putting blocks together and then Bonnie pulled us all to the back of the room to show us the best way to lay out the blocks. It was quite fun to see all our blocks thrown together into a riot of rainbow colors when we were more or less just making a 2 color quilt. The beauty block is easy enough I could see making another scrappy version some day.

 

Did you find me on Bonnie’s blog or Facebook? I’m there several times, including my hexie jacket on Facebook! I haven't seen a post on show-n-tell but maybe that is coming…

I think I've finally recovered from 3 very long days last week, a lazy day and another long day yesterday. Now that I'm typing this post I'm in the mood to go home and sew. I  should be home about 7 or 730 so my fingers are crossed I'll still be in the mood to make more Ruby Beauty blocks...I know a certain person who is going to want my quilt and I would kinda like to keep it under wraps and give it as a gift...