Karlee Porter workshop and quilting extravaganza!!

In my mind, the hottest thing in machine quilting at the moment is Karlee Porter. Her Graffiti Quilting style is distinctive and just frankly awesome. If you aren’t familiar with her work, I would highly recommend hopping over to her site, www.karleeporter.com, following her on Instagram, or checking out her Youtube videos.

My sweet friend, Jessica flew down from Brisbane to spend the week with me – we had our own mini girl retreat including lots of shopping (post coming soon!) and attending Karlee’s class at Adelaide Sewing Centre.

We stayed three nights at the Brighton Caravan Park in an extremely comfortable cabin overlooking the beach.

 

 

Don’t all quilters travel handmade?

Of course, we had to go for a little wander along the beach, the sunset on the first night was spectacular…

 

 

 

 

Even on the following days when the weather wasn’t quite so fine the view was pretty impressive.

 

 

But on to the quilting. Karlee’s class was an intensive two days of sketching, quilting and demonstrating. We were all using our own machines which meant that it was much easier to learn – things went straight into the brain and out through the fingers.

 

 

Watching Karlee stitch out one of her mini quilts on the Handi Quilter Sweet Sixteen was pretty amazing. She’s fast!

 

 

Karlee is also so sweet – she autographed my book and along with the classes sold custom printed fabric panels with her designs on them for us to use in our own artwork.

 

 

As part of my Handi Quilter Prostitcher software I have a few of her digital designs for stitching out – I used them to make a mini each for Jess and myself. Karlee was kind enough to graffiti and autograph my mini which will take pride of place in the new studio.

 

 

Day one saw us create one practice quilt – trying to put all the different pieces of graffiti quilting art together and get them into our fingers. Black thread on lilac fabric made an interesting statement.

 

 

Here is my day two mini quilt, posing with the adorable Karlee. Of course I  managed to co-ordinate my thread colour with my dress.

 

 

Some quilting close-ups. Although variegated thread often doesn’t work well with this sort of quilting, as the colours can become muddy or dark lines may not show up clearly, a lot of the class were fascinated by the colour effect in the densely thread-painted areas, such as those around the arrows. I need to finish this off with some loose background fill and then bind it. I can’t wait to hang it up in the new studio, as I am so very proud of all that I achieved and learned over the two days. All of this was stitched on my Janome Horizon 7700. I’m so keen to try translating these skills to a full sized quilting frame!

 

Have you tried this form of graffiti free motion quilting? What style of quilts, other than whole-cloth, would you like to see it on?

 

 

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