Beach Glass Quilting class

I had a busy workshop week with my local guilds! I also went to a class held by my Quilt Club, on the topic of beach glass quilting. 

It was an enjoyable afternoon & the subject was not too intimidating. It's basically a fused applique style, with the visual effect of beach glass (although as people at the class notes, you could adapt this technique for other effects as well). 

We had to bring along a bag of scraps, some fusible & a base fabric to work on. I don't have a lot of cotton scraps in my stash; most of mine are garment fabrics. But I put together what I could and headed off. Thank goodness there were piles of shared scraps, both from the instructor and other participants, because in the end about half of my 'pebbles' came from other people's scraps ;) 

Basically, we went through, chose a palette, laid out potential scraps, and then fused them down to pieces of Steam a Seam.

Then we could cut little shapes out of our chosen colours, and lay them out on our base fabric, until we were happy with the arrangement. Honestly this took the longest of all the steps! We had some photos of beach glass pieces to look at and that helped with colour choices and with the cutting out part -- it was all freehand and I found I had a tendency to make mine all teeny and blobby. I had to consciously try other shapes until I was happy with a mix of sizes and outlines. Once that was ready, you could fuse down your pieces to the base, and start outlining them in thread -- this necessitates a lot of spool changes, if you want to match colours.

I got a few done by end of class but have had to continue at home so that this doesn't become a UFO! Only two more to stitch down, and then the binding. I think I'm going to bind it in scrappy binding left over from the pieces I used, or maybe I'll just mat and frame it. We will see. It was an entertaining afternoon and I had a lot of fun with this one!