Monday Morning Star Count 2014/5

What a wonderful week for EPP!
I did a whole bunch of stitching today, but hardly any on my own projects.  I taught 2 workshops this week, and I think I'll share pics and progress from those today instead.

First up, the Long Island Quilters' Society.  This guild was so welcoming and their meeting was very well run!  It's an old school traditional guild (of 90 quilters in attendance, only about 4 admitted to reading quilt blogs) and it was so nice to spend the day with them.  One visiting quilter, Margaret, came to show me the EPP she had been working on since coming to my event at the East Meadow library last August.  Check these out.  She made 60 degree diamond stars and embelleshed them for Christmas ornaments.  These are really nice, and much fancier than the one I tried to make..

She also had a STACK of 12-piece star units.. I think she's ready to stitch them together..

I taught the pillow workshop to a group of 35 women and they all seemed to have a good time.  Having such a big group helped me see where common problems arise-- many people have an inclination to want to baste with a running stitch and pull (as if you were making a yo-yo) instead of the back-stitch method I use.  They looked relieved when I said they could save time by taking less stitches.

After 2 hours, many of them were well on their way to new pillow projects.  One student even emailed me a pic of her progress later in the week.  I love emails like that!

I hope you don't mind lots of photos because we kind of had an EPP party at the NYC Metro Mod guild meeting on Saturday.   Lisa asked me to come and teach everyone how to do EPP (which wasn't really that hard of a job since about 50% of the guild EPPs already) and then we started working on a group project of 1" hexies.  At show and tell, there were lots and lots of EPP projects to share:

 Here are Bernadette's blue hexies (1").

 And Ivete's pink ones (3/4"):

 And going even smaller, Karen's 1/2" hexies.  She has twins, so I thought these may  be the beginnings of quilts for those two, but she said they will become pockets on a bag.  (A much more manageable project, I'm sure)

 This may look familiar, Helen with her blue and white strips:

 

Aleeda showed her progress on a pattern from Hexa-Go-Go.  Great colors!

 And the whole meeting, we all just sat back and stitched hexagons.  Some preferred to baste, others to join, but nearly everyone tried it and I even had a few converts~
(Of course some, like David in the back row, stitched his obligatory 8 hexies and then swore he'd never do it again.  Little does he know, this is going to become an ongoing project for the guild.. hehe)

 After 2 hours, 50 quilters were able to make the beginnings of over 5 stars.  This is just what I collected at the end of the meeting (plus a bag of basted-but-not-pieced hexies).  I know some people took theirs home to finish, so it will be fun to see how many we have in April.

Ok, enough from me, it's your turn!
(if it's your first time, instructions for linking up are in this post)