Creating a Quilted Landscape Collage

Laura Fogg has been teaching one-to-five-day workshops on freehand landscape collage quilting for the past ten years and she’s confident that this 2-day workshop will please a wide variety of students. She focuses on a “painterly” approach to art quilting and encourages students to have fun making a creative and completely individual piece based on a photograph that inspires them. The workshop is equally appropriate for beginners and accomplished artists.

Expect this to be a fun, creative, beginner-friendly, out-of-the-box class. You do not need to have any quilting skills besides basic knowledge of how to do freehand machine quilting on your home sewing machine, nor do you need to be a recognized artist. You will discover the “artist within” as you play with the fabrics of your choice to create a small (about 2’ by 3’) collage wall quilt. Subject matter can be a landscape, a still life, or even a fantasy scene… whatever moves you to want to create it in fabric. You will start with a photo of your chosen scene for inspiration and beyond that your own imagination is the limit. (One caution though… for beginners it is smart to avoid subjects that include complicated architecture such as houses or bridges. You will get frustrated trying to get the perspective and details “right.” It will be more fun to stick to nature scenes, where nothing you do can possibly be “wrong.”)

Basic technique is raw-edge fabric collage, where cut or torn pieces of fabric (and/or other materials) are layered and freely arranged to create as much or as little detail in your piece as you see fit. Nothing is pinned or sewn until you are happy with your design, so the stakes are low and the composition can be changed infinitely. There are no patterns, no directions, and no rules.

The piece you create in the first class can be machine quilted in class or at home and brought back for completion in the second of this series of two classes (if there is one). In the second class you will learn how to add borders and create dimensional foreground details in a slightly different raw-edge applique technique.

INSTRUCTOR BIO

I have been a quilt artist for ten years. My one quilting class was with Natasha Kempers-Kullen at Asilomar in 1999. Otherwise, I am self-taught. I had an art minor at UC Berkeley, and have taken numerous painting and drawing classes at the local community college. I have a MA and two teaching credentials in the field of Special Education- I have spent the last 35 years employed by the Mendocino County Office of Education as an Orientation and Mobility Instructor for the Blind.

My quilts have been shown regularly since 2000, and awarded ribbons periodically, at many quilt shows across the US, including the AQS shows in Paducah and Nashville, the Tactile Architecture, Husqvarna and IQA shows in Houston, IQA in Chicago, PIQF, Mid-Atlantic Quilt Festival, World Quilt and Textile, the PA National Quilt Extravaganza and Visions in San Diego. I have been a finalist three times in the MAQS “New Quilts from an Old Favorite” contest, and won a third place in their “bears paw” contest. My own quilts, together with those made by members of my guild, have been juried five years in a row into the “Ultimate Guild Challenge” sponsored by AQS at the Nashville show, winning 2nd place, 1st place, and best of show (two times). Many of my pieces have been accepted into major gallery shows across the country, and have also been published in major quilting magazines in the US and abroad.

Two of my quilts (and me too!) have been featured in documentary films. One was done by PBS in Redding CA in 2004 (“Escape from Skagway”). The other (“An Unexpected Manifestation of Menopause/Laura Takes a Leap”) was filmed by a private videographer and included in “Until the Violence Stops” which aired on Lifetime TV in addition to being shown in theaters around the country in conjunction with the annual performances of Eve Ensler’s “Vagina Monologues”.

I have been lecturing and teaching landscape collage classes for quilting stores, quilt guilds and private groups in northern California and Washington for the past eight years.

I live in Ukiah and have three grown children. Besides quilting, my hobbies include mountain biking, kayaking, hiking, organic gardening and writing. I am the author of a book (a memoir on my experiences working with blind children and their families), which was published in 2007 by Medusa’s Muse Publishing Company.