African Quilt Workshop

Today I took a workshop from Theadra Fleming - a quilt artist from Ypsilanti.

She spoke at the Lansing Area Patchers meeting on Thursday evening. She had examples of African fabrics that were outstanding - including mud cloth pictures on the intricately woven fabric.

In the workshop today, we cut strips from 10 fat quarters of African fabrics and then cut them into pieces. We shuffled the pieces and sewed them into one really long strip - it went all across the room!!!!! That strip was cut into equal pieces, sewn together and then cut into strips again - and then sew THOSE strips together........LOTS OF SEAMS!!!!
Theadra calls this the Keep It Simple technique. It is inspired by the weaving traditions of the makers of Kente Cloth.
We may have had similiar african fabrics, but all the quilts from this class will look different. Hope some are finished for the LAP 2008 show!!!!!

I came home and ironed it good. The borders are from fabric that I purchased from Theadra today. I will have to get some cheap african style fabric to use as backing- don't want to use the neat stuff I purchased from Theadra!!!

When I machine quilted the quilt, the borders were cut down from this picture.