Maria Shell's Visit

Waverley Patchworkers were very lucky to have Maria Shell teach a 2-day workshop recently. Maria Shell lives in Alaska and writes an informative Blog called Tales of a Stitcher. We had a full class and were lucky enough to have a table each so we had plenty of room. She was also our guest speaker the following evening. Maria Shell is a contemporary quilter and has become very popular lately so we were lucky to have her teach.

Here is Maria showing a couple of her quilts.

It was a busy couple of days and we were a bit out of our comfort zone as Maria was encouraging us to cut our fabric without using a ruler to achieve a more contemporary look that wasn't so perfect that it could have been made by a computer. I can understand what she means as you do see some perfect work sometimes that doesn't seem to have any life or excitement to it.

Here is our class photo after our busy two days.

Class photo

This is the block that I completed.

I probably won't do anything with it, just keep it as a reminder of the class with Maria Shell.

The following day was a day off for Maria and so a friend and I took her into the city to the National Gallery of Victoria (NGV)

The was a new exhibition of Kaws on. Kaws real name is Brian Donnelly, I was interested to see the exhibition because I had previously watched a documentary on him. He makes little figurines of his large statues and they sell for large amounts of money. The line to get into the gift shop was 1-3 hours long and that was in the morning. Needless to say, we didn't line up!

Here is the huge painted bronze statue that is in the entrance to the gallery.

Gone by Kaws

You can get an idea of how big it is by the person walking behind it in the background. I felt Gone was a very emotional piece as it is his best friend that has died.

Here is another one in the exhibition called Waiting.

Waiting by Kaws

We asked someone to take our photo in front of one of the statues.

Maria Shell has left Australia now and has gone to New Zealand to teach at their biennial Symposium. She says that she has plans to come back though as many people were disappointed not to do a class with her.

Bye for now,
Linda