Green Tea and Sweet Beans at Symposium

My first class at Symposium was Green Tea and Sweet Beans with Jen Kingwell. I enrolled in this class because I really wanted to learn Jen's way of hand piecing and hand applique. At the end of the two day class I felt very happy with what I had learnt, and knew I would get faster with more practice.

I don't know if I'll ever make a full Green Tea and Sweet Beans quilt, but the techniques I learnt will certainly be put into practice in other quilts.

On the first day I hand pieced two tiny Propeller blocks.  We learnt how to make our own plastic templates, and how to hand piece neatly and accurately.

On the second day I made a quarter of a Halo block.  I consider this a bigger achievement than it really is, because Jen was teaching the Halo quilt the next day, and I had already made a quarter of a block in my Green Tea class. I could go ahead and make a whole Halo quilt if I really wanted to, but I still find curves a little bit tricky.

I also hand appliqued some clam shells.  Again we made plastic templates, but this time we drew the stitching line onto the right side of the fabric.  I've previously English Paper Pieced clam shells, so this was also something new for me.

I loved using the new Aurifil 80wt for the hand applique. 

Jen had a suitcase full of her beautiful quilts to show us. She didn't mind us handling them to get a sense of just how soft they were.  Jen uses Quilters Dream Cotton Request batting in all of her quilts, and hand quilts them with Aurifil 12 wt.

Halo quilt

Queen's Cross

Queen's Cross

Queen's Cross

Glitter on the left

I also took the Glitter class with Jen, so I will write more about that next week.