Quirky Bits in Quilting Class

The Martin County Quilters were ready for Quirky Bits!

After my "Taming the Scrap Basket" lecture the night before, they showed up with wonderful fabrics, ready to get scrappy and have some fun!

What a great place for a quilt class...one of the community centers at Pinelakes Gardens and Estates in Stuart, FL. Nice and bright, lots of tables and helpful people...but, as usual almost everywhere, don't forget the extension cords!

Besides meeting wonderful quilters, one of the interesting things about teaching is figuring out how to use the space available, which of course you have not seen beforehand.
These double stacked chairs made an excellent holder for my portable design walls.

Quirky Bits was designed to use scrappy little 3" blocks.
The original is on the right. Cherry-Cherry made the lovely monochromatic version on the left.
The Martin County Quilters had a number of aproaches to "QB".
One person had a wide selection of purple batiks for a one-color quilt, while several others took advantage of the coordinated-yet-varied jelly rolls. A few actually had scrap strips:

.... one person came totally organized:

This scrap basket was beyond "tamed". It was completely house-broken!
We were all in awe of this.
And if some of us laughed, inside we were all envious and wished our strips were so well arranged.

It never takes quilters long to find this bowl of chocolate and mints.
It is for medicinal purposes, and it's a good thing I bring it along. Even a fun class can be stress inducing, so almost everyone needs to make at least one trip to the bowl!

The Martin Co. Quilters are only three years old, and I feel quite honored to be the first teacher/ speaker they have hired. They are forming up into a very large and active guild with a great future.