Thursday 14 February 2013

Cut and Come Again Workshop with Edwina Mackinnon


On February 9th, Mid-West Branch members attended a Cut and Come Again Workshop with UK tutor Edwina Mackinnon.

We also had a few members from the Kerry and Cork branch attending, it was nice to see a few different faces at the workshop.

At the start of the workshop, Edwina got everyone to lay out the fabrics they were planning to use for the workshop. We then went around to every table to see what people were going to use. Even at this stage it was evident that everyone had a totally different choice of fabrics and colour schemes. Advice was given to people about certain fabrics which wouldn't work, the importance of keeping some contrast fabrics, but use the proportions of colours wisely etc.

Some of the fabric selections were:
Moya's fabric selection
Liz's fabrics

Cecilia's fabric selection
Ger's fabrics
Tracy's fabrics
fabrics by Berndatte
Mary's fabrics
Phyl's fabrics
Gillian Sheehan's fabric selection
Grania's fabric selection












After the decisions were made on fabric selection we started to cut into our chosen fabrics. Edwina showed us various ways to create different block types, so everyone got busy cutting and sewing.

This proved to be a very addictive workshop, as the leftovers from one block could be used to create another block. One thing leads onto another, reflecting the name of the workshop "Cut and Come Again".

Edwina had listed a sheet or large piece of wadding on the requirements list and everyone used theirs to create their own design board. When working on a quilt like this, a display board of some type is necessary to ensure that colour proportions are correct, that you don't make too make blocks of one type etc.

One of the workshop attendees was totally taken by this way of quilt-making and was heard to say "sure why would you need to make a quilt any other way".

Edwina also had a number of Cut and Come Again quilts with her, showing how you could make up the quilt in different ways by adding sashing, using the blocks in rows, different layouts etc.

A very nice thing about this workshop was despite the fact that we all working with the same sized squares, the variety of colours, block construction etc. met that everyone's quilts will turn out totally different.


This workshop was very much enjoyed by all the workshop attendees.  I think there's going to be lots of "Cut and Come Again" quilts in the Mid-West Branch in the near future.

Thanks again to Edwina Mackinnon for a very enjoyable workshop!


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