I grew up in a teaching family, as my grandmother and mother were teachers. Although I have no professional training in teaching, I've always enjoyed teaching people about quilting. (I think my years of 4-H public speaking really paid off.) As you've recently seen in my posts, I love to help young people learn to sew. Over the years I've talked to many quilters at guild meetings, quilt shows, and through other mediums, like TV. For 5 years, APQ staff would make two trips a year to Milwaukee to tape a PBS show with Donna Wilder. I learned a lot from Donna as she had been doing TV for a long time. (not to mention becoming friends with Luella Doss, an incredibly creative woman!) Then came Alex Anderson and HGTV. Wow, is Alex a pro or what! When I was 28-weeks pregnant with the girls I taped a series of videos for APQ featuring Viking sewing machines. And, most recently I have been a guest on the Fons & Porter PBS show sharing the APQS Lenni machine with Liz and Marianne. Each time I have tried to teach the audience something!

As technology changes and improves, we are now headed to the on-line class videos. In the past year I've had the chance to tape two of those.

My first one is for APQU. I focused on Working with Wool and giving the viewer tips for making the quilts I made for Goldie and Virginia.



My second one is for Fons and Porter. Here I focused on learning to longarm machine quilt. I created a variation of a Log Cabin pattern to make the quilting process easy! I've had so much fun learning to use all of the APQS machines myself, I wanted to share with all of you how fun it is.

So whether you head to your local quilt shop and sign up for a class or visit one of these web sites, take the challenge to learn something this year. There are so many techniques and quilting styles out there to choose from.