Ilze Aviks Workshop

Wow! What a great workshop we had this past weekend with Ilze! She is a wonderful instructor and so passionate about her art. That enthusiasm was just contagious!! You can see some of her art work on her web site to get a better idea of what she does. And these are not small pieces!

It was also fun to be with Carol for the weekend to eat, talk, eat, talk, eat, talk...you get the picture! A fun girls weekend along with some education!

This was walking into our hotel room which turned out to be a handicap room! Not sure why we were given that room but it worked out nicely.

Our bedroom!

We even had this cute little table so both mornings we brought our food back to the room and ate breakfast...we did open the curtains so we had a nice view of outside!


So what do you think this is??? A galaxy? Oh, this was funny...Carol spotted this star on the pavement in the parking lot on our walk Friday night after our dinner. We did leave it in the parking lot although I felt badly about that....poor little star!

So onto the workshop.....Some of the ladies working away on their stitching!

Ilze started us off by working on one piece of fabric and using it as a sampler for all the different stitches she showed us. Here's Carol being very intent on her stitching.

These were our two neighbors pieces (you can click on the pic to see them better).

Some more samplers in their hoops still being worked on.

This is Carol's sampler piece. She brought linen for us to stitch on which turned out quite nice.

This is my sampler piece. Again, you can click on both Carol and my piece to see them closeup.

Next we worked with disperse/fabric crayons, transferring a pattern to polyester fabric. Same method I've done with the disperse dyes but this time it was drawing with a crayon which was fun. Here's a pic of our critiquing by Ilze and the group. It was so interesting to get feedback from the class in addition to Ilze. Just wonderful!


Here is Carol's transfer and stitching. We had to stitch one area that we didn't care for the color and make it into something and the other one we had to add density to it. Carol added french knots to the left drawing and her density work is on the right. I really liked the yellow french knots. Carol thought the yellow would change to orange over the red and I would have thought so too..but it didn't.

This was my piece. The stitching on the left was my density piece and the right side I added couching. I used a funky green and couched with yellow then I switched to purple to couch with. Again, click on pic to see the image better.

Next lesson was collage work. We had to use the transfer crayons onto organza and add other fabrics under the transfer organza and stitch the pieces to a background fabric. I'm still working on my piece and in fact I did some more stitching on it last night. I'll post pics of it later this week. This is just my transfer onto the organza.

This is Carol's piece. Isn't it cool! I love the colors. She put black and white fabric under her transfer in places and it turned out really nice.

These are the entire classes collage pieces. You really need to click on the pic to see the stitching. We took turns getting up close and personal to see each of the works.

This was Sonja Hagen's collage piece. Isn't it cool!

Some other collage pieces which are wonderful!

That's all I have! It was a great class and I would take another workshop from Ilze in a heartbeat. I did get my suitcases all put away last night as soon as I got home BUT my sewing room is a mess! I was taking items out to show Bob and then I wanted to stitch last night so again just grabbing items from my bag. So off to put that room back together so I can work!!