A Weekend With The Master

This year I grew up and joined my local Guild. I have enjoyed it very much, I should have joined before. Well, I couldn't when I was working, I worked Saturdays, but I should have joined as soon as I finished work. Everybody has been very friendly, and I come away each time enthused. This year is their 40th anniversary, with many of the original members still attending. I realise these women have so much they can teach me.

 To celebrate their anniversary, they arranged a weekend of  Kaffe Fassett and Brandon Mably.
Kaffe and Brandon work on the principle that there can never be enough. Less is never more in the colour stakes anyway. Recently I have been more drawn to plainer, solid quilts, not necessarily quieter but quilts that are more restrained. Yet, I still have a secret hankering to the madness that is the Kaffe Fassett Studio designs. Huge cabbages and roses in loud, loud colours. Coupled with lilies in even louder colours. It is good to push the boundaries too.

I went to a Kaffe Fassett lecture, way back in the dark days of 1980. To be frank, the loud cabbages seemed, well, bonkers, but they really drew me. Then it was really the knitting that attracted me. Big oversize cardigans with so many colours and so much going on. So, I was intrigued and my friend Alison and I signed up for the lecture on Saturday and the workshop on the Sunday. First up was the Guild meeting on the Saturday morning. The archivist at the Ulster Folk Museum brought 13 quilts, a baker's dozen, to show us.  Quilts in N Ireland weren't made with a wadding, just the top and backing. I can imagine the itching through the backing.

Saturday night was a lecture in the Ulster Museum (a different Museum to the Ulster Folk and Transport Museum, we were being very cultural!) Both Kaffe and Brandon were very humourous, the presentation was great, with lots of cabbages and roses. It was fun to see all those old knits again too.

Sunday, my friend and I were at the venue early, the list of fabric requirements was rather onorous, and we had decided to pool resources and wanted two tables together. Of course, we actually had more fabric than we realised. And of course, a lot of our fabric wasn't what we actually wanted when we started! This is all yardage that I realised I wasn't going to use. Ho hum!

 That's always the way. Everybody was very friendly and a bit of swapping went on too. What goes around comes around.

We also used our design walls for the first time. By the end of the day, we mostly had the bones of a snowball quilt.

Of course none of the cornerstone fabrics I had brought were suitable for my snowballs.

 I ordered some more fabric which came today to add to the half dozen purple and black spots cornerstone fabrics I had.

 I will take the striped squares out, they are totally wrong and hopefully it will pull together better. I can't say I love it yet. Do you love it Helen? No, not yet. But I will do shortly. I loved some of the others quilts better, they were more pastel, more bright, more together. It is like the looking at other people's dinners in the restaurant! My quilt is on the left in our quilting corner, which comes up very dark in the photos.

I don't generally like quilt borders. But ... I think on this occasion I will go with the borders. I have ordered a busy purple small print for a narrow first border.

 And then a louder, stronger large print border for the second 6" border.

 My son very kindly "offered" to be my fabric mule. There will be a parcel of fabric waiting for me when I go to visit him later in the year. Fabric is oh so much cheaper in the USA. I do try to support my local shops, but sometimes, it is hard with such a big project. Fabric that is $12 or $13 is generally about the sterling equivalent of $19 or so in the UK.  Generally, with a solid or semi solid flimsy I like a pieced back. On this occasion, with such a busy flimsy, I made the rare decision to buy the coordinating backing.

 A really busy fabric too, but it somehow works.

Kaffe went around all the quilts and critiqued them. Alison and I were second and third from then end. Here is the man himself at the quilt before mine.  It was like being back in school. He was very kind, he said mine was very interesting. I had varying colour stories going on, but they were all going to pull together. I hope they do! I am hoping he means I was pushing the boundaries instead of going for the obvious ...

As you know, I like to leave you with something funny or light. Way back in 1980 or whenever, the five of us girls went to the Drumkeen Hotel in Lisburn to hear Kaffe and his groundbreaking knitwear. We got the bus, not the city bus service, but the rural blue bus. The talk went on longer than we thought. How much could one man say about knitting? We went out for the bus, and waited, and waited. A helpful local shouted out his car window, no point in youse  girls waitin' fer the blue bus, youse'll be waitin' til the mornin'! So we walked, back to Belfast. Not sure how far, but glad we weren't wearing high heels anyway! I was always a yarn hoarder, my then boyfriend, now husband, could never understand why I had bags and bags of wool about my room. Why I couldn't buy for one project, Finish it. Buy for the next project. He suggested that if I knitted all my wool down to one bin bag, he would buy a Kaffe Fassett knitting kit, far beyond the expenditure of my student dreams. I was reminded of that on Sunday, and you know what? I still have more than one bin bag of yarn, though nowadays I would never dream of putting my precious yarn in a bin bag!

Happy sewing or knitting or whatever floats your boat.

Helen x