A few weeks ago, my traditional guild brought in guest speaker J. Michelle Watts to lecture and present a series of classes. I was fortunate enough to take a super fun day-long applique class with her.

Quilting students watching J. Michelle Watts’ machine applique demo.

Michelle’s focus is on machine applique with a southwest theme and it was very interesting to me how many Southwest designs have a little bit of a geometric modern vibe to them.

Some of Michelle’s beautiful class samples.

As any well prepared teacher would do, Michelle offered kits available for our class and many of the students took her up on that offer. The medallion piece was a great exercise to practice stitching angular shapes, sharp points, and tight curves.

My friend Cory stitched her practice sample on a striking black background.

Of course, I had to go my own way and try something completely different! 🙂 I may not actually do anything with this piece, but it was fun to try out the teacher’s methods and pick up a few tips and tricks along the way.

My version – it’s such fun to play!

No matter how much I think I know about a particular subject, I always learn something new whenever I take a class. The best tip I picked up from Michelle’s class was to use a dotted outline when tracing shapes for fusible applique. It’s much quicker than drawing the whole line!

Drawing dotted lines rather than a full outline of the shape is much faster!

Thanks, Michelle, for a great day – and a fun class!