This weekend was the River City Quilter’s Guild Quilt & Fabric Art Festival! Truly amazing artists exhibited their work, from detailed paper piecing to joyous freeform and pictorial fabric expressions. I have included a few some pictures of my favorites, though by no means all of my favorites.

Undoubtedly the best part was the all-day Sunday workshop I had the privilege of attending, taught by the amazing textile artist April Sproule. April’s work marries textile paints, quilting, and hand stitching to create stunning pieces, and her workshop focused on fabric painting using stencils. Having never tried such a thing before, it seemed a wonderful way to expand my fabric-related horizons. I try to take every chance available to get truly messy, and usually feel like the true work of art after I finish painting anything is what I’ve managed to do to my hands. In this case I quite like what I’ve done, and I look forward to adding some stitching to quilt-ify them.

This wonderful experience was punctuated by a personal episode in which my best friend left me a voicemail about a potential paint night outing. Wine! Paint! Bonding! This is all normal. The thing is, I took a look at the automatic transcription first, and read that we should bring a picture of our butt, which would then be sketched and you could paint it yourself! What a scandalously joyful outing! (This is, in fact, still all normal.) It turns out the paint night requires you to bring and paint a picture of your PET, which though somewhat less scandalous, is perhaps equally joyful.