Thankful Friday

Thankful for...

-Great guest speakers for my class, Spencer Nikosey and Kevin Ou, who are doing incredibly fantastic things. We had a great time listening to Spencer and Kevin's stories and all my students got involved, asking questions. It's one thing for them to understand it's important to network and to not be afraid to ask for advice, but it's another thing for them to be excited about their own ideas and actually bounce them off guests and each other. The class was bubbling with excitement; lots of chatter even after class ended at 10pm.

– Taking a class, myself. I got to take Jane LaFazio's Quiltlet class at the Long Beach quilt show. Jane and I met at a sketchcrawl and I've been following her adventures ever since. She does fantastic work with the kids at Mundo Lindo, too. Do you see all that she does?! Jane's my hero. She also wins big points for referring to my guy as 'Hunky Jan', of course. We got to catch up over lunch; it was so good to see you, Jane! xox!



– starting and finishing a quiltlet (a small quilt):



It's so good to be able to start and finish things. Me and my ever-decreasing attention span. [sigh]
This was painted then quilted and embellished, about 5-1/2" square on uncoated artist canvas.

- Learning new, dangerous things. Jane goes, "Wendee! Have you seen Spoonflower fabric?!" and I'm thinking, "OMG! Yes! I know of it. I think it would be dangerous for me to actually see real samples... Noooo, don't pull out yours! Aaaaaack!".

I tried to hide my eyes, but Jane, she was just too fast.

Did I really need to know you can control the scale and repeat pattern of your own custom-printed fabric? Noooo. Did I really need to see Jane's fabulously cute apron with fabric printed with her own watercolor brush painting? I think not.

Dangerous, dangerous ideas that threaten the whole "Use it Up" campaign.

- Speaking of UIUtGIA, finding out that some of the UIUtGIA artwork has arrived where it was going.



This one went to my quilting buddy, Donna.

– One of my former students brought me stuff! You'd think that in an industry of people who design and manufacture stuff, that eventually someone would bring by stuff that they'd designed that was finally being sold, in real life, huh? I mean, I'd be excited to see my stuff in the stores ...

So I harrassed erm, relayed my dismay about this, in particular to the students who interned at Vans, because the shoe companies make loads of samples, and, heck, who wouldn't like a spiffy pair of new Vans shoes?

So after teaching for 4 years, one of my students delivered! Cool new shoes! Woot!



[I'm having issues with embedding Flickr images. Bear with me, people]

What a fun week. Have a great weekend all! :)