My friend Wendy Butler Berns

I have known Wendy for many many years.   She used to reside in the Chicagoland area and then she ran north behind the cheddar curtain like my dear son and now lives just outside the Madison Wisconsin area.

Wendy and I have had our paths cross earlier this year when we were taping episodes for this upcoming season of The Quilt Show. 

(hint: my episode will be airing on July 15th!)

Wendy is also one of the original educators on the Craftsy site.  

So I asked her to give some insight into her classes and this was our exchange.

Wendy, What topics do your Craftsy courses cover? My  "Free Motion Quilting and More" course covers everything you need to get started with machine quilting!  Preparing the quilt for quilting, creating a sample for use with the walking foot and one for the darning foot.  I also cover my tips on threads and needles.  The course has proven to be very successful for students ready to jump into machine quilting.  My course "Pictorial Quilts with Machine Applique" covers my detailed steps for creating pictorial quilts starting from a line drawing or photograph.  The outline follows my book "Photo Album Quilts" which is now out of print.  Students are enjoying experimenting with original design using my machine applique process.  The third course is "Art Quilting 101".. I love to encourage students to jump in and experiment with the spontaneity of working small.   We explore embellishing with threads, fusible designs and adding 3-D texture to our pieces... lots of inspirational ideas.

I also wandered to Wendy’s website to see what she has been up to.  I have seen this quilt in person and of course it is a favorite.

….and then I visited her pattern page.

 

Yep. this one won me over immediately.

 

 

Check out Wendy, for a Craftsy class, a great pattern or to teach/lecture for your guild.  She is a great person so spend some time with!

Enjoy your day,

Frieda Anderson–Guest Blogger

 

Frieda Anderson is a friend of mine who’s Craftsy class just went LIVE!  She is one of the sweetest people I know and when our paths cross I love catching up with her in person.

So I asked her a few questions to introduce her to you and I highly recommend you check out her class!

My class is called Machine Quilting the Home Sweet Home Quilt. It is about overcoming the fear of free motion machine quilting. Learning 20 basic machine quilting designs and placing them on a project called the Home Sweet Home Quilt.

1. What year did you make your first quilt? Traditional or art

I made my first quilt when I was in high school. It was a 4” patch quilt made from dress scraps. I made it with my maternal grandmother. I can still remember cutting out the cardboard template and drawing around it with a pencil. I might even have hand stitched it together. I know we tied it when it was finished.

2. What is the first show, and year, that you ever entered your art quilts? Venue?

I entered Paducah I don’t remember the year but in was in the 1990’s. My first award was in 1992 for a miniature quilt. It was in a local show and it won a first place ribbon. I was beyond thrilled.

3. What is your artistic style?

I would say that my style is free form. I like nature, trees, leaves and flowers and much of my art revolves around those themes. I love saturated color and tend to use really deep hues in my work. I fell in love with hand dyeing fabric 20 some odd years ago and have been working with my own hand dyed fabrics ever since. HOWEVER that doesn't keep me from “collecting” other fabrics.

4. Have you ever changed your style from when you started making quilts? OH yes, I vacillate between fused art quilts and my own original pieced quilts. I like doing both. I’m a Gemini so of course there are two sides to the coin.

The reason that I made a pieced project for my machine quilting class is because I wanted a project that everyone could tackle. Not every quilter likes to make art quilts and I wanted to make sure that people who took the free motion machine quilting class would put all the designs that are offered in the class on a finished project so they would learn to handle working on a small quilt. Each area on the quilt has a design assigned to it. That took all the guess work out of the process, something people really fear.

I teach machine quilting all over the country and hear so many people tell me who scared they are of the process of machine quilting. I wanted to help them over come that fear and have a very manageable project to work on. The quilt in the Home Sweet Home class is 40” x 60” finished a good starting place to do free motion machine quilting.

 

CLICK ON HER CRAFTSY CLASS BANNER ABOVE TO GO RIGHT TO HER CLASS ON CRAFTSY!

You can sign up for a chance to win a free version of this class here.