I will be teaching two classes at the Kansas City Regional Quilt Festival in June. The first class is based on my Fruit Stand quilt. I will be teaching it on Thursday, June 13, click here to go to the class listing. I love this quilt, it is so fun to look at and to make. 

This quilt makes a great workshop because it is full of skills to learn – I love taking workshops where I can learn or polish a skill. The most obvious skill for this quilt: piecing clamshells! It can be a little intimidating at first – but once you know the tricks and get into a rhythm, it goes together quite easily.

You may also notice that there are some pieced clamshells in the quilt in the way of some fruit slices. These blocks are foundation paper pieced then set into a circle. So you will learn how to foundation paper piece and how to set a circle inside of another circle. When I inset a circle, I simply piece it in using a couple of pins – it’s the fastest, easiest technique that I’ve ever used.

Then there is a little applique! There are lots of ways to conquer applique and there is not much of it in this quilt. We’ll work on needle-turn hand applique and machine applique.

Finally, we’ll talk about quilting and strategies to get clamshells quilted quickly, continuously and the importance of variety!