Victoria Sewing and Craft Show

This amazing show was taking place in Victoria, Vancouver Island on March 12 and 13th.

I was all booked to go on the 12th, classes paid and everything. The little organizer that I am. The weather refused to cooperate and after the most mild winter on record for 65 years, it snowed SNOWED Friday morning when I drove down to Victoria. Not a little white fluffy stuff: 3 inches in the space of an hour. They closed the Malahat for a while, which is a nasty pass right before arriving to Victoria. So with much sadness, I had to turn around.

Thankfully, the wonderful people at Green Tree shows was willing to reschedule me and I was also able to attend all the classes I had signed for, which ran for 2 days!!!! How happy is that?

In the morning, I took a free motion sewing class. We were taught how to draw on a quilt or fabric freehand. We learned how to make circles, squares, and wonderful designs. I had been making free motion designs, but this class really clarified a lot of what I was doing wrong, and put me on the right track for what I'd sense intuitively, like you have to get your foot pressure up to maximum, but that doesn't mean that you feed the fabric a million miles an hour. Very  helpful.

I had an hour (only) before my next class to wander the aisles, or as Lisa would say, to wOnder the aisles. What a feast for the senses. Not so good for the pocket book, and lots of supplies and 5 books found their way to my bag...

Then I spent the rest of my time gawking at Kayla Kennington's booth, who makes works of art out of silks and beads. She was here both days teaching an early morning class on fabric collage.

Here is some of her work:

How is that for utterly gorgeous?

In the afternoon I took a class called "Some like it hot". The instructor Denise Taylor, shared with us so many bits of cloth and fabrics that can be heated, burnt or steamed to create funky textures. It was fun. The smoke alarms never came off.

We learned about Texture Magic. You use it under a top fabric, do the free motion designs, and when it's steamed, it puffed up and fills the spaces....3D with an iron!!!! ? It shrinks a maximum of 30% in all directions. You can imagine all the great designs  you can easily do with that. Gotta love it.

We then painted some Tyvek with metallic paints and submitted that to the heat gun. FYI, I was told that the Tyvek enveloped given away freely by the US Post Office contains Formaldehyde and PBCs. Same for the Tyvek on construction sites. It seems the one designed for crafts does not. Or maybe it`s all propaganda, but why take a chance?  Here`s what it looks like...

Lots of possibilities with that. Flowers, relief in paintings.... yum.
We next moved on to Solvron. It`s a water soluble fabric that shrinks and puckers when it`s soaked in hot water. Denise applied it to a bunch of colorful threads:

Can have its uses, I guess, I`m just not sure what yet.
We also played with melting foils on top of Pellon and Misty Fuse, submitted some felt (not cotton) to the heat gun. It sorta puckers, but particularly melts away and ends up looking like lace.

She also showed us how to use Lutradur. You can paint it, tear it, it doesn`t fray, and when heated, it disappears in places, again just like laces.

We melted some Angelina fibers, which are so gorgeous, and she showed us also how to melt until part of the fibers so that whips remain that can be incorporated in a picture, being the hair of an angel, the fins of a fish, etc. Many gorgeous applications.

Finally, to my eyes`pleasure, there was fantastic artwork on the walls of the Conference Centre.

This sure was so much fun.