The Agony and the Ecstasy

Or rather, the exhilaration and the exhaustion. My workshop with Nancy is over; the adrenalin levels have dropped; and after a week of early starts, late nights, restless sleep and intense days, I am feeling somewhat fatigued. It's going to take me a while to process all of the information and feedback from this week. And since I will be spending 12+ hours in transit getting to San Francisco today, I have plenty of time to start thinking about it. Nevertheless, here are some preliminary thoughts:

1) The Crow barn is a superior facility - we had a large class of 20+ students but we all had good light and plenty of room to spread out;

2) Margaret, our personal chef, cooked fabulous meals each day for 45+ people in little more than a conventional kitchen. Our workshop output would have been severely compromised without refuelling from Margaret!

3) Apart from a couple of throwaway comments about favourite colour combinations, Nancy talked very little about colour this week. Instead, we were left to our own devices. I have not worked with solid colour fabrics before and tried to experiment with some different palettes. My results looked different from my other quilts and were not entirely successful but I have lots of ideas that I want to try out at home; and

4) When I look over my portfolio of quilts, I realise that I have only ever made one asymmetrical, abstract quilt that did not involve repetition of a block or unit. This simple quilt was from a long time ago:

No wonder that one of Nancy's comments was that I need to work on my composition skills. Food for thought...