Travels: Why am I in New Zealand?

March 6, 2019

Because of the Quilters – of course!

Especially this one. Heather Craig and her husband Colin were amazing hosts. Heather also did almost all of the organizing for this journey. She was the “tutors convener” for the 2017 Christchurch Symposium. With the profits gained from that event the board brought me back to New Zealand and sponsored my lectures all over the country. She put in countless hours and I’m forever grateful to her.
I cannot express my gratitude enough for all the wonderful women who traveled (sometimes several hours) to come share an evening learning the Elements of Art with me. I spent time with friends new and old. Here we are in Invercargill, in a library room where quilters were madly scrambling to find more chairs for all the women who showed up. (This is only a few of them… and almost half an hour early too!)

I spent an entire month rather short of sleep because New Zealand quilters are so much fun to chat with. Nelson here… quite a bit early. They had booked a room with 100 seats and after an article in the local newspaper had to turn away people. This was early… every seat plus a few were filled.

I’m not entirely sure – but this might have been at the college in Dunedin.

In Christchurch I spent three days with the hardworking members of the 2017 board, playing with all sorts of elements of art and design. Here we are working with abstract designs they created themselves.

I love it when there are quilters in class who “don’t do original designs” or “abstracts” in my design classes.

What is a traditional block quilt friends if not abstract) but then they create wonderful things.
The REAL work done in class is not the fabric creation…. …no. The real WORK is learning the design and analysis process.

(If you are interested in doing some really fun but truly deep work to develop your design and analysis skills – join me in August of 2020 at a 5 day retreat at the Hudson River Valley Greenville Arms in New York.)

Here we are in …. Palmerston North I think. Lecturing in a funeral home. It’s honestly one of the most well equipped venues for a quilt guild I’ve been to. And from what I’ve seen, New Zealand quilters also LOVE their “supper” after each lecture. Which means they had refreshments. Sometimes quite a spread. Which is another reason I always got to bed much too late.

We had a quick stop at Susan Claire’s place. You can see her many tutorials on youtube where she is known as The Gourmet Quilter.In Whangerei, they took me to see a lovely little Hundertwasser style structure at the site where a Hundertwasser style museum is under construction. I can’t wait to see it completed!