A thrilling class with Sharon Schamber

This week my quilt guild was fortunate enough to host Sharon Schamber for some workshops and a lecture at  the guild meeting.  The above quilt may be familiar to many of you as it has won numerous awards and has appeared in several magazines.  It was so exciting to see many of her award winning quilts up close and personal and I was happy to get some pictures of her amazing applique and quilting.

Here is a picture of Sharon apparently giving an autograph while answering a guild members questions.  Meeting Sharon in person was so inspiring. I, along with much of the quilting world, have been in awe of her work for years and I was delighted to discover that she is so giving of her knowledge as well as being an interesting and nice person.  For such a "star" she is down to earth and happy to share many of the techniques that she has developed and uses.  I was able to take 2 classes from her, one on machine quilting feathers on a domestic machine and another on longarm quilting techniques.  Both were so filled with information that I hope I am able to put into practice.  She certainly has some unique ideas and techniques but that is what made the classes so inspirational.  Amazing what you can do with some true fabric construction knowledge and some sewing machine expertise and apply it to quilts, especially when you are willing to think outside the box and try new things.  The other thing that amazed me was that she brought blocks from quilts that are in development and shared them with the guild, even to the point of allowing photos.  I decided not to post these, as much as I would like to share, because of all the concerns about design copyright etc. but I can assure you that there is more spectacular work to come.

Just take a look at some of this quilting from another award winner.  Black thread on white fabric, amazing!  And that cord work is incredible.  I used to think of Sharon Schamber as intimidating but after seeing her quilts in person and meeting her I consider her no less than a quilting genius. Though I will never produce anything that even comes close to her work I'm hoping that by using what I learned I will be inspired to push myself to achieve more than I thought possible.