Welcome

Tonya here. Welcome to the Lazy Gal Liberated Amish 2010 Get Together Blog.

The theme is Liberated Amish. What is that you ask? Well, we're taking our inspiration from Liberated Quiltmaking (including letters) and from Amish quilts.

To be more specific, in this class (or should I call it a challenge?) we will:

1. Each pick an Amish quilt from the Faith and Stephen Brown collection to be our starting point. You can pick one from their website or get ahold of the book Amish Abstractions (buy, borrow, or get it from your library - interlibrary loan is a wonderful thing). Whichever quilt you want - it's okay if everybody picks the same thing or nobody does.

2. Use solid fabrics (generously interpreted - hand-dyes, mottled batiks, blenders, marbles....)

3. Make the quilt liberated.

You can use any of the methods Gwen Marston showed in her Liberated Quiltmaking books (Liberated Quiltmaking, Liberated Quiltmaking II, and/or Liberated String Quilts) or come up with your own method of liberation. (You know how I feel about these books - they make my heart sing. Read them if you haven't, please)

Just as a note, some of the quilts in Amish Abstractions are already liberated to begin with - you don't have to make them even crazier.

4. Throw in some liberated letters or numbers somewhere on the front of the quilt. You can do this however you choose, for instance incorporating letters into the blocks themselves (or the center of a medallion) or put your name and date in the border.

The goal is to complete the top by the end of June. It can be any size you want.

Helpful links are in the sidebar.

There will be no set instruction. I'm not going to tell you what to make. But you will hopefully get lots of encouragement and any needed assistance from me or any of the other participants. I love figuring out different ways to make a quilt, that's part of the fun. So if you get stuck at any point, just ask.

You don't have to have a blog but you will need a Blogger account to make posts on this blog. To participate, leave a comment on this post if you have your address set up to show OR send me an email (tartbr47 at hotmail dot com) if you are a no-reply or don't have a Blogger account.

I need the email address to send you your invitation to join. (If you don't already have a Blogger account, you will be prompted to create one. I repeat, you don't have to have a blog, or a blog on Blogger, just the account).

Once you've gotten the invitation to join, hop on in and write a post introducing yourself. Please put a label on your post with your name. See how this one says Tonya? It also helps if you indicate who's writing the post at the very beginning of it.

Any questions? Just ask.