Browse our galleries of quilters, friends, and teachers past and present - and let us know if you've got contributions to add to our collection of photographs. We'd love to share yours here.
Majestic Mosaic Karen Kay Buckley from Carlisle, PA won the Best in Show award for this quilt at the AQS show in Paducah, KY this week. The quilt is machine appliquéd and machine quilted by Renae Haddadin from Sandy, UT. Karen Kay also won Best in Show at Paducah in 2013! We are so pleased to have her as a teacher at our 2015 Quilter's Retreat. Congratulations Karen!
Plans are beginning to take shape for our 2015 Mayflower Quilter's Retreat at Pictou Lodge. We are happy to announce our lineup of teachers for the 2015 Retreat - first of all the dates are Wednesday September 23 - Sunday September 27, 2015. Registration forms will be really early in January 2015, registration will begin mid March 2015.
And the teachers are...
Fiesta Mexico - Karen Kay Buckley
Karen Kay Buckley from Carlisle, Pennsylvania
Karen has over 300 quilts to her credit and her personal work has received numerous awards including nine Best of Show Awards, including the 2013 Best of Show at the American Quilter's Association Show in Paducah, Kentucky. Karen was voted "Teacher of the Year" by the Professional Quilter Magazine in 1997. Her work has been featured in numerous magazines and calendars. Karen has fourteen "cover quilts" to her credit (she considers herself very lucky!). She has appeared on Simply Quilts and AQS show American Quilter. Karen has a very busy schedule teaching, judging and designing.
Karen has written four books and has numerous patterns published. As well Karen has developed several of her own products and useful tools including her amazing scissors!
In A New York State Of Mind - Ana Buzzalino
Ana Buzzalino from Calgary, Alberta
Ana Buzzalino is a fiber artist and quilt instructor living in Calgary, Alberta, Canada. She has taken numerous workshops with renowned quilt and fiber artists throughout the years to improve her skills. Some of the workshops have been with Hollis Chatelain, Laura Cater Woods, Katie Pasquini Massopoust, and Elizabeth Barton among others. She has also attended various classes at the Alberta College of Arts and Design.
Ana has been a teacher on a variety of quilting techniques for the past 22 years. Some of the recent workshops have been on Machine Quilting with focus on free-motion quilting, and New York Beauties Blocks quilts, which is one of her interests. Her present focus is on Art Quilts, incorporating different elements for surface texture.
Ana's quilts have won several awards at local and national shows, and have been juried into major International shows.
Make and Break - Laurie Swim
Laurie Swim from Lunenburg, Nova Scotia
Laurie has worked as an artist for some 40 years, developing unique and innovative treatments to fashion her imagery in textiles with fabric and thread. She has written three books, two published internationally, on quilt art. The Joy of Quilting with an Introduction by Alex Colville, 1984, made her an early leader in the art quilt field. Laurie's third book, Rags to Riches: The Quilt as Art with an introduction by Mary Pratt, was published in Canada in 2007.
Laurie's works grace many private and public collections, including the Art Gallery of Nova Scotia, Nova Scotia Art Bank, Nova Scotia Designer Craft Council, the City of Toronto Art Collection and the Museum of Arts and Design in New York.
Del Mano Gallery in Los Angeles, California has represented Laurie since 2007. She is also represented by Zwicker's Art Gallery in Halifax, Nova Scotia, and Amicus Gallery in Chester, NS.
Laurie is recognized as one of Canada's best living artists.
We are so excited to have these three exceptional teachers at our 15th Quilter's Retreat,be sure and visit their websites to see more of their work. The pictures shown in this blog post do not necessarily represent the workshops they will be teaching. Workshops will be announced in September.
Patsy at work in the Rotunda
We really are getting down to the last details. It has been a hectic summer and I apologize for not being here more often. After 17 years in our old huse we have made the move to the beautiful town of Mahone Bay. It has been exciting but exhausting and we are still getting settled, dealing with electricians, plumbers, carpenters and I am listening to the drilling in the basement as I write, the old oil tank has to be replaced! Yes, we have bought another old (145 years) house.
Meredith, Ann and I have been "the" committee this year with much appreciated help from Jamie, Faye and Katherine. We are hoping we haven't forgotten anything! Yes, we have done this 13 times before but each year there is something different. This year we have had changes at Pictou Lodge to deal with and thanks to Amanda, the amazing events coordinator we are going to be well taken care of.
Pre dinner gathering on the verandah at Pictou Lodge
We have also had to reorganize a bit when Karen Neary had to cancel her workshop due to family illness. We completely understand Karen's situation and we hope that she will be back to teach at our Retreat soon. We tried to find a replacement but everyone we looked at was already booked. So, thanks to the cooperation of everyone who was booked in her class we are going ahead with just 2 teachers (Cheryl Arkison and Penny Berens) and the independent study. No one opted out, everyone took a second choice. Thank you to all who changed their workshop. We know you will still have a wonderful time and learn a lot!
All set up for our "progressive show and tell" with mary's selvedge quilt on the wall.
Now, if I can just find my rotary cutter and my favourite scissors I will be happy!
Thursday, September 19, 2013 | MQG in Getting Ready, Pictou Lodge, Teachers | Post a Comment | Share Article Congratulations to our Retreat teacher Karen Neary whose quilt "Roundabout Again" has been accepted into the AQS Quilt Show in Paducah, Kentucky We are so fortunate to have Karen be one of our teachers at the 2013 Quilter's Retreat. Read about her acceptance, "The Mailman Came" here.
"Roundabout Again"
Karen will be teaching "Roundabout Again" at the 2013 Quilter's Retreat, September 25-29, 2013. Congratulations again Karen!
We are also excited to announce that Cheryl Arkison's new book "A Month of Sundays" will be published by Stash Books and will be available August 1, 2013. Cheryl has written about her new book here and here you can see a sneak peek at the pictures from the book.
Our third teacher for the 14th Quilter's Retreat is Penny Berens from Granville Beach, Annapolis County, NS.
Penny admiring Alex Schofield's Olly, Olly Oxen Free
Penny's mother and grandmothers instilled in her a love of embroidery. They would embroider the household linens which were used on a regular basis and washed and starched and ironed every week.
As a young woman her life was filled with training a husband, bringing up children and working at jobs outside the home. No time for embroidery in those days. Finally in 1989 when her youngest became a teenager she looked for something to feed her need to create. No embroidery to be found anywhere, so she signed up for quilting lessons. Perfect, she could make cosy quilts for her boys. But it wasn’t long before she lost interest in the functional quilt. She thinks only one of her boys got a quilt for his bed!
Crow
Once a quilt becomes a wall hanging the possibilities are infinite and she explored every avenue, every technique out there and every fabric available. So much fun with days filled to the brim and nights playing with machine embroidery.
Sprinkling of Sand on Seaweed
Penny found the embroidery stitches of her childhood quietly creeping back into her work. So a natural progression was to sign up for City & Guilds Embroidery and Design with Dundee College. This was before the age of Internet connectivity and so her studies were done using postmen and airplanes back and forth to Scotland.
In the midst of studying the fairly disciplined City & Guilds design process, Penny accidentally joined a group of intuitive painters who taught her to pour paints freely and allow her inner voice to take over. These two opposites have played a major role in shaping her process. The focus of her work is intuitive but there are times when she finds planning and control hard to resist!
Two of Penny's quilts have been honoured by the Canadian Quilters’ Association with awards for excellence in appliqué and innovation in appliqué. More recently her work has been honoured with an honourable mention by the Threadworks Jury. Part of being an artist is the sharing of one's work with others. To that end, Penny's work has been in shows and galleries throughout Canada and as far a field as Arizona and Scotland.
In addition to being a member of Connections, Penny is a member of Visual arts Nova Scotia, Nova Scotia Designer Craft Council and the Studio Art Quilt Association.
Penny's work can be found in various publications including: “Points of View” by Valerie Hearder published 2008; “CEGments annual Review 2007-8” Canadian embroiderers’ Guild magazine: "Embroidery" Magazine January 2004 issue; "Contemporary Quilts: Design, Surface & Stitch" by Sandra Meech Published in September 2003: “Quilts Are Forever” by Kathy Lamancuso published in March 2002; and various Canadian Quilters’ Association Magazines.
Grey Sand
In 2007 Penny retired and moved to Granville Beach in beautiful Nova Scotia. This has had a huge effect on her work. Today her muse is the landscape and natural world around her. Hand embroidery now covers her wall hangings more often than machine embroidery. Dyeing with nature’s gifts has replaced procion dyes. Even Frenchy’s finds and hooker’s blankets can be found in her work.
Oh, yes and Penny has become a blogger where she shares her love of the world around her and the stitching that goes on constantly. Visit Penny at http://tanglewoodthreads.blogspot.ca/
Here we go again! Planning is well underway for the 14th bi-annual Mayflower QG Quilter's Retreat at Pictou Lodge, NS. For those of you who have been before you know what a wonderful place Pictou Lodge is and what a wondeful Quilter's Retreat we have. I can't believe we have been at this for 30 years! It has gone by all too fast!
Once again we have a wonderful line-up of teachers and workshops. I will introduce them to you over the next few posts.
First up is Karen Neary from Amherst, Nova Scotia.
Karen Neary has worked as a professional quilt designer since 1989. A prolific designer, her quilts have been featured in numerous magazines including Quilter’s Newsletter, McCall’s Quilting, AQS Magazine, Quilter’s Connection and The Canadian Quilter. For12 years, Karen wrote a regular column in Quick & Easy QuiltingMagazine. Sew Karen-ly Created…patterns are available at selected stores as well as from the website. Karen has contributed to 14 books (C&T Publishing, House of White Birches, Leisure Arts, DRG). She has designed projects forBenartex Fabrics, Robert Kaufman Fine Fabrics,YLI Thread, Freudenberg-Pellon, Sew-Fit Templates, Michael Miller Fabrics, Northcott, Hobbs Batting and P&B Textiles. Several of Karen’s quilts have been exhibited at the International Quilt Festival in Houston, Texas and toured North America with YLI Thread.
Karen’s New York Roundabout is featured in the current Keepsake Quilting, Clotilde, and Mary Maxim catalogues. In 2008, A Portrait of Anne took first place at the Kindred Spaces Textile Show in P.E.I. and travelled to Japan to be exhibited at the Yokohama International Quilt Show and International Quilt Week Fukuoka in Yahoo Dome.
Canadian Heritage Quilting (Formac-Lorimer Publishing) is co-authored with AQS Quilt Appraiser Diane Shink. Log Canada, one of Karen’s quilts featured in this book, was chosen as part of the “O Canada” 2009 special exhibit by International Quilt Festival of Houston. The show opened in Chicago and spent the year travelling across the U.S. In 2011 and 2012 two more of Karen’s quilts were chosen to be part of the same travelling exhibit. Farrago was a semifinalist at the prestigious 2011 Paducah, KY Quilt Show; Tempus Fugit was selected to be part of the National Juried Show at Quilt Canada in London, May 2011. In September 2012, Log Canada will be one of 23 Canadian quilts featured in a show in Franceat Carrefour Europeen du Patchwork.
In July 2009, Karen Neary’s quilt To Be Where You Belong was presented to Sir Paul McCartney to commemorate his visit to Nova Scotia.
Farrago
Fruitsmoothie
Karen Neary is a graduate of the Bachelor of Arts and Bachelor of Education programs at Mount Allison University. She is a member of the Mayflower Quilt Guild of Nova Scotia and the Canadian Quilter’s Association. Karen hails from Five Islands and currently resides in Amherst, Nova Scotia, Canada. To visit Karen's website click here.
Easter Antependium, one of a series of 7 commissioned by the Baptist Church.
We are looking forward to having Karen with us at the Quilter's Retreat next year!
Daphne Greig
Daphne made her first quilt in 1980, after years of sewing as a child and in later years for her family. She began teaching quilting classes at local quilt shops in 1990. She has extensive teaching and presentation experience including lectures to over 300 attendees. Daphne has co-authored four quilting books, designed over 100 published patterns, has regularly written articles for quilting magazines and teaches internationally and online at Quilt University.com. Daphne's work has been exhibited in Canada and the US. Her goal as a teacher is to encourage students to try new techniques, to expand their skills and, most importantly, to have fun and enjoy the creative process. Sheconsiders herself a 'student' of fibre arts and works at developing her own skills by attending workshops and participating in associations that further the art of quilting.
GIVE AND TAKE APPLIQUE
Learn a surprising 'no waste' way to create positive/negative appliqué designs in this workshop. With careful cutting you will have the motifs for two blocks. In a one-day class, students will use the pattern provided. Longer workshops will explore other design options. The workshop also includes machine appliqué instruction using many decorative machine stitches.
Elaine Quehl
Elaine Quehl is an award-winning Canadian quilt artist and teacher who specializes in colourful and intricately stitched pieced and appliquéd art quilts. Her quilts are recognizable for their depth and contrast, exuberant colour and abundant texture. Her work has been juried into numerous shows and exhibits at the national and international level. Elaine travels across the country delivering workshops and lectures to colleges, summer art programs, guilds, conferences and shops. She is recognized for her expertise in free-motion machine quilting, fabric dyeing, and many innovative techniques for creating original quilts.
MACHINE QUILTING A to Z
This workshop will be a combination of 2 of Elaine’s most popular classes on machine quilting. Expand your repertoireof beautiful free-motion stitches! This course is designed for machine quilters who are familiar with free-motion stipple quilting, but need creative ideas to venture beyond stippling. Experiment with cotton, rayon and metallic threads. The best thing about this method of quilting is that there is no need to mark your quilt top, and nothing to wash off after. Bring along a quilt(s) for advice on how to quilt them. You will take home samples of at least 20 more free-motion designs that you learn in this course, and we will study free-motion feathers in depth. Time will also be devoted to learning how to combine motifs.
Jane Sassaman
Jane is a contemporary quilt artist, fabric designer, author and teacher whose critically acclaimed work inspires creative confidence in aspiring artists of all backgrounds. Her internationally known quilts are known for their bold designs, celebrating the energy and miraculous beauty of garden flowers and plants (and the occasional skeleton!). Jane's quilts are shown worldwide and can be found in many private and corporate art collections. Her quilt Willow was named one of the best 100 American Quilts of the Century. Jane is also an accomplished teacher of design and quilting for guilds and conferences around the world. She travels internationally, teaching groups and individuals how to nurture creativity, sharpen powers of observation and overcome creative obstacles. Jane spends part of her creative time designing fabric for the quilt fabric manufacturer Free Spirit.
ABSTRACTING FROM NATURE
Nature is an endless source of inspiration. In this class we will examine a wide variety of artists interpretations
of nature before beginning to manipulate natural forms ourselves. Through a series of exercises we will experiment with abstraction and exaggeration to capture the essence and energy of your favorite flora and achieve dramatic visual effects. We will then translate these ideas into fabric in the 3 day workshop. Drawing skills are not needed but participants should have a strong interest in developing their own design language and unique visual symbols. This class is especially beneficial for the drawing impaired and the tragically literal. Nature is an endless source of inspiration. In this class we will examine a wide variety of artists interpretations of nature before beginning to manipulate natural forms ourselves. Through a series of exercises we will experiment with abstraction and exaggeration to capture the essence and energy of your favorite flora and achieve dramatic visual effects. We will then translate these ideas into fabric in the 3 day workshop. Drawing skills are not needed but participants should have a strong interest in developing their own design language and unique visual symbols. This class is especially beneficial for the drawing impaired and the tragically literal.
