January 11-13th I attended Craft Napa In Napa.CA. Its Northern California's premiere crafting retreat for sewists, crafters and quilters and I'm so lucky to live just an hour and a half away. Its a  4 day extravaganza for sewing, quilting, surface design and inspiration organized perfectly by Pokey Bolton.

Squeezing in two six hour classes to my new years schedule I took Sherri Lynn Wood's Round Robin class. Working on improve quilting we added to the quilt top that was passed around every 30 mins. This was quite an intense class as you only had a short time to "continue the conversation" on the quilt top. The fabrics were chosen by the maker and rotated around the class but the personal touch was to add a little of your own "signature" fabric.

The second class was Using Symbols in Art Quilts with Deborah Boschert. In this class we had six 5 x 7" art quilts to work on using designs and symbols that were meaningful to each person. We had pre-fused fabrics to work with. The aim was finish one piece with free-motion quilting, hand embroidery, mounted and finished.

My themes or symbols were mountains, hiking, family and ocean. The last piece I worked on was a single glorious flower growing out of a plant pot, not sure of the significance of this symbol!

Friday night at Craft Napa is Crafters Market. This year we were lucky enough to sell raffle tickets for the quilt, Rainbow Fish, that I designed and helped make with Foothill Quilt Guild. The response from all the people that spent the time looking at it was great and we sold a lot of raffle tickets too. The quilt will be raffled at our quilt show on April 7th 2018 in Auburn , CA.

Look out for Craft Napa 2019.  Its a fun, inspiring event when you can surround yourself with like-minded crafty people at the perfect location, Embassy Suites in Napa. 

Look for some exciting news that I will be revealing next week, Feb 7th.