Last weekend I took part in a fun workshop at Handcraft Studio School in El Cerrito. Watercolor quilting. Yes, watercolor quilting. It was so much fun! We learned how to use special fabric dye to create an abstract watercolor painting on 10" squares of fabric. Then we made a quilt sandwich and learned how to free-motion quilt using the painting as inspiration. Some people did abstract quilting and some people made recognizable images, but they were all wonderful.
I chose to stick to a single color in a couple shades, since I'm not too great at color mixing on the fly. It was perfect, though, because it allowed me to really focus on the patterns that emerged from the paint and find interesting ways to emphasize certain shapes and lines. The quilting on the back is just as interesting as the quilting on the front (maybe even more so since my paintings aren't that interesting).
Ashley, the instructor, is a professional quilter who teaches classes on Creativebug that are great for learning to make quilts. In the workshop, she gave some tips on how to free-motion quilt without having to buy all the fancy tools, and recommended a few tools that she wouldn't want to do without. She said the watercolor quilting class will appear on Creativebug sometime this year, so that is definitely something to be excited about! I'll need some reminders for sure.