This January I was lucky enough to attend one of Cassandra Ellis’ quilting workshops (thank you brother!). There are so many quilting and patchwork courses on offer at the moment, but I always got the impression Cassandra’s would be a little different. Cassandra Ellis makes bespoke contemporary quilts with no overly fussy quilt blocks, just clean and simple shapes made with a beautiful fusion of fabrics and colour. When I first saw her quilts they reminded me very much of the simplistic style of the Quilts of Gee’s Bend. It was wonderful to see some of her quilts first hand, she has a great eye for colour and pattern.

We were all told to bring some fabric we loved or that held some kind of memory for us. Last year my mum gave me a collection of beautiful black threads and rustic looking metal tools. Apparently my great grandfather used to dabble in cobblery. They were such a tactile group of objects that I knew I wanted to used them in some way, so I decided to draw together all of my black, white and neutral fabrics and then quilt the pieces at the end using the black threads. All these fabrics were already in my ‘stash’. I’ve always liked using differnet weights of fabric in patchwork (which lots of people will tell you is very wrong!) so I used some 100% wool from Ray Stitch, a selection of light block prints from Our Patterned Hand, linens from Fog, Linen, Work, bought at Selvedge drygoods, and lots of other scraps which have been collected over the years. I also added some trims from the Cloth House to some of the fabrics to create some stripes.

The workshop was split into two parts, firstly we learned how to create an contemporary version of a traditional log cabin block from one of Cassandra’s template designs. This was actually the first time I had used a proper patchwork ruler, I usually cut out my templates in card and then cut round them. Although it wasn’t as fiddly as I thought and produces much more accurate results! The second part of the course taught us how to design our quilts on graph paper and then calculate our measurements for each of the fabrics we would use. This part made my head hurt slightly, but it’s a great skill that you really need to be taught rather than read from a book. Throughout the day there were numerous tips, stories and show and tells, which were all very inspiring. And not to forget the delicious lunch! I couldn’t recommend the day enough to anyone with passion for fabrics and patchwork. You can read more about Cassandra and her classes on her website and blog here and she also is about to release her first book in the autumn called Quilt Love.

So my black and white piece – although I’m tired of looking at it as it has been pinned up and waiting to be blogged for quite some time, I do think it has potential!  I’m going to make a couple more varying the fabrics in each. I have decided not to design the quilt as we were taught to in the class, but keep making samples like this and sew them together when I begin to visualise the piece as a whole. Then of course I’ll take out my great grandfather’s black threads and start running them through the layers.