VCQ Visits Berry Hill Resort & Conference Center

Last weekend our VCQ quarterly meeting was held at Berry Hill Resort & Conference Center, South Boston, VA.  Wow! Can you say gorgeous?  What a beautiful place!   An antebellum plantation built in 1728, Berry Hill is one of the few surviving examples of classic Greek Revival architecture.  It is a National Historic Landmark that has been transformed into a resort and conference center without detracting from it's period elegance, and one of the premier wedding venues in VA and NC.  It is a place I would love to go back to for a get-away, to relax and enjoy the amenities.  Unfortunately for us, it rained all day Saturday, so most of my pictures are from indoors and through the rain drops.

 I should have driven up to the mansion to get a picture with an unobstructed view, but there is a better picture on their website.  The view through the window is the back courtyard. On the bottom left is the courtyard between the mansion/conference center and the hotel.  The view of the goose is from inside the front door of the mansion looking down the lane that approaches the mansion.

It was a lovely facility for our workshops; our participants were thrilled to have plush, wheeled, adjustable chairs to sit in all day!  The dining room/ballroom was a beautiful locale for our buffet lunch, and what an elegant, delicious lunch it was!  We had a salad, soup, sandwiches, homemade chips, and brownies & cookies for desert.  It was lovely to sit in the elegant room with table linens and wait staff to serve drinks and remove tableware.  A nice change from our usual box lunches!  The ladies on the bottom right were showing the results of their fabric origami class, butterflies and poinsettias.

At the end of the day we had class show & tell as well as other projects members had completed.  The photos above are from the non-class show and tell.  As part of our workshop, one group worked on our community service project making comfort pillows & totes for mastectomy patients.  We completed 24 sets of pillows & bags, plus some additional pillows.

Celebration Day 4

Our final day at Celebration was a morning wrap up on Sunday.  After breakfast, we gathered in the auditorium for class show & tell, final announcements, and some additional "bonus" door prizes.  Then we said our farewells and headed home, with fond memories of stimulating classes and all the fun.  These pictures are small, but since there were 9 teachers who each taught 2 classes, this post would be really long if I didn't make collages.

 Above, class projects by Cindy French, Laura Blanchard and Nancy Prince.

 The 4 above are Pat Speth, Linda Ballard, Linda French (longarm quilting), and Priscilla Hair.

 The last group is more from Priscilla Hair, Bonnie Hunter and Come Quilt with Me.  There were also 2 classes on Electric Quilt with Evelyn Townsend, but alas, nothing to take pictures of!

Our final trip through time in the tardis resulted in Virginia & David Banks being the winners of the BabyLock sewing machine.  Actually, Virginia was the winner but since they both quilt, maybe they will share it!

 And finally, one last look at the beautiful scenery and a fond farewell till next time!

Day 3 Continued

Saturday lunch was a "tea party".  Everyone was encouraged to wear hats and/or gloves to lunch and everyone received a favor of a tea cup pin cushion.  There were some great hats!

Our Saturday evening program was a trunk show by Bonnie Hunter of her string quilts, followed by more door prizes from the time traveling tardis, block lotto drawings, and announcements of the silent auction and raffle basket winners.

Celebration Day 3

Saturday started with an early morning walk down to the lake.  Here are some shots of the view.

My second workshop was with Bonnie Hunter, called Basket Weave Strings.  I usually tend toward more artsy classes, but this time I felt like doing something different and I really liked the  look of the project, plus I've never taken a Bonnie Hunter class before.  She's really popular with a lot of quilters and its easy to see why. Bonnie's enthusiasm is contagious and she helps us make a dent in the scrap bin - and create a few more!  This was a pretty relaxing class, just a bit of instruction to start with followed by plenty of time to sew.  The string blocks are pieced on a foundation, so other than cutting the foundation papers, no measuring required!  Strips are random widths and don't necessarily have to be straight.  

 Above Bonnie is showing some of her antique string quilts.  The class project is on the right.

 Bonnie demonstrates the foundation piecing process.

These are the blocks I completed in class.  There might have been more, but after sewing 10 blocks I realized that I was sewing without any tension, so then I had to fix them all.  I was happy to get 16 blocks done in spite of that.

Celebration Day 2

Day 1 of Celebration was a half day - afternoon arrival, getting settled in our rooms, followed by dinner and an evening program.  Day 2 was the first workshop day.  I took Thread Painting with Nancy Prince.  We worked on portions of a small landscape - one section was done on stabilizer and then used as an applique, while the other was stitched directly onto the background.

The finished project will resemble the picture below.

Friday's evening program was a lecture by Pat Speth, the "Nickle Quilt Lady" (she is the author of the Nickle Quilt books).  She had lots of quilts to show that all started from 5 inch squares, and also showed lots of border options.

The evening was capped off with more door prizes and time traveling antics.

VCQ Celebration 2014

This is a long overdue post.  VCQ's Celebration retreat happened at the end of April, and I'm finally getting around to writing about it.   We have this retreat every two years, with 2 days of workshops by both national and Virginia teachers.  It is a jam-packed weekend with vendors, a silent auction, 3 evening programs that include trunk shows, door prizes, block lotto drawings, and lots of fun!  This year's event was no exception; in fact, the committee did an outstanding job with their "Quilting is Timeless"/Dr. Who time travel theme. 

Above is a view overlooking the lake at the Smith Mountain Lake 4-H center, and the main activity & dining hall building.

Here you see the Quilting is Timeless Tardis created by the committee, and Monique & Marty in garb from one of their time travels.

The first night features show & tell of projects begun at previous Celebrations.  There were many quilts shown this year, quite of few of which were like the bottom picture, Jamestown Landing, which is one of Bonnie Hunter's patterns.  Bonnie was a teacher at the last 2 Celebrations, and again this year.  Everyone loves her scrap quilt classes.

VCQ Quarterly Meeting

Our March quarterly meeting was held this past Saturday in Kilmarnock, a town on the Northern Neck of Virginia.  VCQ meetings are hosted by local guilds and we travel all over the state.  It's been a great way to see parts of Virginia that I might not travel to otherwise.  Kilmarnock was a very welcoming town.  They had a welcome message on their town sign board, one local guild member hosted an afternoon tea at her home on Friday afternoon, and local merchants featured items that would appeal to quilters.

At this meeting we had 4 workshops plus a Come Quilt with Me group where people brought their own projects to work on.  The classes included chenille rug making, redwork, a Civil War cot quilt, and our new community service project, which is making comfort cushions for mastectomy patients.

Everyone had a great time and is eagerly anticipating our next event, our biannual Celebration, which is a 4-day retreat at the end of April at the beautiful Smith Mountain Lake 4-H center.  There are 9 teachers scheduled for a variety of workshops and a full roster of participants.  Looking forward to the fun and frivolity in store from the planning committee!

Paint Stick Class

At the VCQ meeting I took the paint stick workshop with Karen Lee Carter of Virginia Beach.  I've used paint sticks before but was happy to play with them again and pick up a few new tips and ideas.  Karen Lee was a well-planned and organized teacher.  It was a relaxing and enjoyable day.  These are some of my sample pieces.

 The piece on the left was done using a torn file folder, applying paint to the edge and then shading it off the edge.  The piece on the right is done with a stencil.

 The pieces on the left and center were rubbings over hand-carved rubber stamps.  The one on the right was masked with tape and shaded around the edges first, then laid over a piece of mat to create additional texture marks.

Here, the left and center were both done with rubbing plates; the right piece was rubbed over a hand-carved stamp.

The class was a good opportunity to practice some techniques I hadn't used recently.

VCQ in Virginia Beach

A few weeks ago the Virginia Consortium of Quilters held our November meeting in Virginia Beach at the Resort & Conference Center on the Chesapeake Bay side of the city.  We had 88 people attending for a day of workshops and the annual business meeting.  Workshops included playing with paint sticks, a 10-minute block class, a wool project, an angle play project and a miniature mystery, as well as Come Quilt with Me. Here are some class show and tell pictures.

My friends and I stayed over an extra night to play tourist a bit; Sunday turned out to be a gorgeous sunny day, 71 degrees.  We had breakfast at Pocahontas Pancake House in VA Beach city, walked along the beach and climbed the Cape Henry lighthouse, the first lighthouse built in the US which was in operation from 1792 to 1881.