Spring! – inspirations and celebrations

Hi everyone,

it is spring in full force finally!!

What brings me real joy is to see Marley with a pep in his step again – it could be just me, but I think I saw it for the first time this past Saturday…He misses his buddy Rocky and so do we, but life marches on and this glorious Nature’s awakening all around us helps so much! 🙂
Ah how good the sun feels on my face!

 I finally feel capable of sharing some good quilty stuff with you all – YAY!
Quite a few things are going on or have been, so I’ll go in a bit of reverse order:
 This weekend I had a great honor and fun to meet Jackie Gering !! Jackie is a passionate quilter and one of the founders of the fabulous Modern Quilt Guild and the whole movement. Not too familiar with Modern Quilt Guild/movement? Well – you really need to check it out! This past February there was a wonderful, national quilt show devoted to modern quilting, called QUILTCON
 So if you never heard about it, check those links for sure, however, I think the best and most personal way to find out about it all (and have some good fun!) is to have the virtual visit to several lectures that happened at Quiltcon – you can do it over at Craftsy web site, it is available as a FREE series of lectures . That is how I first “met” Jackie Gering. Loved it.
So, needles to say when I realized that she is coming to Buffalo to give lecture/trunk show and workshop – HOORAY!!!
This past Friday I had wonderful three hours (yes, 3h trunk show!)… It was inspiring, personal, exciting and just plain FUN.

Jackie played with a traditional Dresden plate…
I just love the dance of colors and shapes in this quilt!

And then she played some more! 🙂

The color of the background fabric is just brilliant…

Not to mention the quilting! 🙂

And then, here is another classic – Log Cabin. A bit elongated, improvisational, playful … Beautiful!

Or this one that Jackie calls minimalist Log Cabin – simplified and set free to play – with colors, with composition and negative space in between – fabulous!

 I loved the quilting on this quilt!

Of course picture never does it justice, but I tried… 🙂

Oh and added bonus – look at the back of that quilt!! 

 This is one of my favorites – you should have seen how this quilt started its life! It looked very, very different and it wasn’t working…so some un-stitching, some cutting and slashing, lots of creativity and – voila!

And of course, some amazing quilting.

This is just a small part of a fabulous lecture and trunk show that Jackie gave us – three hours of inspiration, creativity and fun chat. Yes, I said THREE hours my friends – just fabulous. If you have a chance to invite Jackie or go to one of her lectures – just do it!

If not, you can enjoy her beautiful book, QUILTING MODERN that she wrote with Katie Pedersen.
I had a wonderful, relaxing few hours on Sunday, in my garden – chair by the waterfall, coffee in hand and Marley by my side…
It was one of those moments when you know you could be doing lots of other things (laundry or vacuum, organize few things or…) but instead, you say “NO” – lets just relax and enjoy the moment. I can’t believe I did it, but I did! YEAH.

The best part? Not only did I relax for a bit and really enjoyed the moment, but what I read in Jackie’s book made me think. A page right at the start, titled The Improvisational Path had so much to think about! Principles of improvisational work such as Honor the past, Release you inner artist, Embrace serendipity… and one important one – Fail. Oh, so much to talk about – I hope to have time to actually write more about all this – a book review? 🙂

In the meantime – what do you think about these principles? Any of it ring a bell? If you already have Jackie’s book, what do you think about it? Let me know, I would love to hear it and talk about it!

Also, great chatting and inspirations on Jackie’s blog – check it out!

I just looked at the title of this blog post – I think “inspirations” is justified but what am I celebrating? Not sure…but feels like it a bit. It’s spring – enough reason to celebrate, right? 🙂

I promise to be back here soon with some other quilty fun to talk about.
Have a wonderful Mayday and a whole beautiful month of May,
Marija