Still in Switzerland

Once in a while, I was able to see the Alps outside my hotel room...

Because of the weather, many people who had come to hike the Alps were not able to....

My students worked very hard and I am quite happy to show a few of the more finished pieces.

These are just a few of the pieces that were done...one was finished, one was fused and ready to quilt and the other was partially quitled.

The greatest part about being a teacher is when the students make a gigantic, or sometimes small, breakthrough in their point of view. For many of the students, they had done none or little free form work. This opened up new horizons and helped them take those first steps in to creating their own works.

I love this! I love to see people "get it" and really get excited about making their own work rather than just doing things like someone else's.

It is so gratifing to do this....many years ago while in college I turned my nose up at teaching but then, what did I know at the ripe old age of 21? What a snob I was! I do have to keep teaching in balance because it is so easy to get caught up in teaching and not spend enough time in my studio which is most important to me. It is where I keep fresh, try new ideas, follow my ideas to where ever they go, and just absolutely be myself. I am in solitude there with few distractions.

I am truly blessed to be able to live this life both teaching and working in the studio.

I stayed with Patrica after the workshop;

Her home is out in the country in a little village and is absolutely delightful. It is very modern and comfortable with a beautiful garden. Her home is filled with art she and her husband have collected from all over the world. As her husband travels for business frequently, this collection has become quite large and very interesting.

The garden is in a Japanese style as you can see from the Bhudda sitting outside the window.

As it was late spring, everything was blooming and the iris were most impressive. I took many pictures of the koi pond, and other flowers and various decorations.

Marianne Bender was also at the seminar taking a workshop with Dijanne Cevaal's workshop.  Sophie had taken my on line classes and it was great fun to see what she was doing. She had worked with some photographs in one of my classes before and was continuing to do so in Dijanne's class.

This is one of the two pieces she was working on in the class.

Marianne Bender was also taking Dijanne's class and  is the one who was responsibile for getting my name to Christian Sauder who put on the seminar.

Later, we went to Marianne's winery and had a delightful time eating little bites of cheese, bread, meats and tasting five different wines they make. Absolutely delightful as Particia Sylvia, Marianne and Margo, all from my on line classes got together with their husbands for this fun time. What a wonderful experience to be able to visiti someone's winery and share with them in their home.

this is inside the outside of their home and tasting room and the other picture is from inside with Marianne. I neglected to get a photo of her husband who was watching the weather constantly while we were there.

Patrica, Sophia, and Patricia's oldest daughter, Enodie, went to see a wonderful retrospective exhibit of Nicolas de Stael...he committed suicide at a young age (45) but went through cubism to his own work and it was great to see the transformation of his work over his short lifetime. His color work and composition are truly outstanding and I was so happy to be able to see this artist's work and to add another artist to my library.

At the museum there was a wonderful sculpture garden which we enjoyed walking through.  While there we saw this woman sitting and joined her for a conversation.

  

Great artwork, including one of Rodin's five, The Kiss, a Henri Moore piece, a large, three sided mosaic by Chagall and many others.  A delightful day which was finished up by searching for appropriate tee shirts for my grandsons.

I did it again! My students' work

I actually got on blogger again! I found the right button, found the place to put it in Anglais rather than French and off I go! Now I will see if I can upload any pictures!

 One of the students, Anne, brought in a lot of fabric swatches which greatly improved our ability to find the right color for our exercises...I just thought they made beautiful pictures by themselves!

 so now we start with my students! Some are Swiss, some are German and some are French...but all spoke French except for me...

Anne-Marie (above)

Anne (above)

Catherine (above)

Caty (above)

 Christiane (above)

 Marie Elisabeth (above)

 Marianne (above)

Marie France (above)

Martine (above) who was also my translator

The other Martine (above)

Nadia (above)

Suzanne (above)

These pictures were all taken on the last day and also show the quilts they started. We had a lively discussion about art quilts and traditional quilts and how difficult it is to be accepted in a club when you do art quilts. (sound familiar) Also a lot of discussion on when is a quilt art...at least Europe has a strong respect for craft which made it a little easier!

This was an outstanding class and it was wonderful as we got to know each other, even with the language difficulties.

More to come...

My apologies to the Pointless Sisters of Sonoma County

From across the world from home, I took a few minutes to try to bring everyone up to date with what had happened to me in just a few weeks.

Working from my poor memory I mistakenly called the Pointless Sisters by another name. Some one wrote to me about it but everytime I went to pull up my blog, everything showed up in French and I could not figure out to to do a new post.

Finally, I have. So I am sorry, Pointless Sisters, you are not twisted, and you are of Sonoma County and not Rohnert Park.

so that is all for now until I get home to the States and can work more comfortably and I won't post anything with out checking the facts...

and so much more

I have continued to be very busy.

My son got married on May 22 in Michigan so we were all there for the wedding...there went a week away from home.

I returned home and got ready to teach with the  Twisted Sisters group at Rohnert Park We had three days of hard work creating new fabrics with various surface design techniques. They certainly made of a lot of new fabric! What fun it was!

And before I knew it, I was packing for Switzerland.  I have much to write about but not tonight as my time is very limited here.

This is outside the hotel where we are having our seminar. We are up in the mountains at about 4200 feet and it is a steep climb to get up here. I arrived via a cog train which brought me to my final point for five days. It was a long flight from SFO to Heathrow, and nice flight to Geneva but we could not fly directly for some reason and were 30 minutes late in arriving so I missed my train to Leysin. I caught the next one but this put poor Chritiane Studer (the very nice woman who has put the seminar together) in to almost heart failure as she had gone to the train station to pick me up and I wasn't there.  She was so happy when I arrived by taxi!

Meals are huge! Breakfast has many choices, including various cheeses and bread which are to die for, cereals if you want, hard boiled eggs, and lots of other goodies including Norwegian smoked salmon.

and then we break for coffee after working 1.5 hours. Which includes coffee, tea, hot chocolate, etc and some kind of coffee cake along with more fruit.

and in another hour and a half we stop for lunch which is really dinner. The Swiss do not eat like this at home but this is at a plush resort hotel. He have had duck with a wonderful sauce one day, today we had sole, also in a delicious sauce, always with a salad before hand from a salad bar with wonderful goodies, the least of which is lettuce. Dinners are similar but we are served a first course...two days ago it was a plate filled with smoked salmon. And then on to dinner which has been lanb, or roast beef  along with scallops in another wonderful sauce, beef,  and already I have lost track of everything we have been having. And the desserts show up....four little scoops of special differenct sorbets in a chocolate line waffle bowl and other drizzles of some sort of sauce and other little special things. I have now learned to leave lunch before dessert comes as two a day is a little too much.

Oh yes, after lunch the class resumes at 2pm because it takes 1.5 hours to eat lunch. Then we stop for tea and some other goodie an hour and a half later. We stop the class at 5:30 pm and then have dinner at 7pm which will also last 1.5-2 hours...very leasurily and beautifully presented.

this is the smoked salmon before dinner

In between eating my students have been working exceptionally hard. Here is one group working on their color wheel.

And the other group just as busy.

I have 12 studetns who come from France, Switzerland and Germany. Of course, everyone speaks French except me. I am finding that if I really listen closely, sometimes I can tell what they are saying. Christian has supplied with with Martine, who does a wonder job  translating for me. And if she isn't sure there are other people in the classroom who also help.

I have left them finishing their first quilts and staring on the second one. We will put the work up and I will be taking pictures of everyone with their work.

And, very special, three of my former students from my online class are here. It has been wonderful to meet them in person and there are giving me a bad time about why I haven't done the advanced class so they could take it...well, decision made, it will be offered in January.

So, I must get ready to go for dinner....oh, this is so difficult! And so very much fun. Everyone is absolutely delightful and a joy to be around. They are all very excited about what they have been learning and are looking forward to "new horizons".