Aotearoa Quilters Tutors Seminar

This weekend I attended the inaugural Aotearoa Quilters Tutors' Seminar in Wellington.

The three day course was full-on and packed with great information, networking with others from the quilting world and of course lots of fun. We also had the Aotearoa Quilters AGM and dinner on Saturday evening.

Bobby Duncan (organiser), Yvonne Roberts (tutor), Jared Murdoch (tutor), Louise Murdoch, Jenny Bacon (tutor), Natalie Murdoch (convenor)

We were divided into two groups - Green group and Blue group - reflecting the colours in the Aotearoa Quilters logo. My group was the Green group. With about fifteen members in each group there was an excellent attendance at the seminar and lots of people to bounce ideas off and to learn from their experiences.

The first day was spent with Jenny Bacon from Australia. Jenny is an internationally qualified Quilt judge. We learned about what judges look for, ways that work (and don't work!) for judging exhibition quilts, and we had a practice session at judging each others' and some of Jenny's quilts. It was very enlightening and entertaining. One really nice thing that happened was my quilt 'Draco' being judged best Art quilt of the small group of quilts we had.  'Best of Show' was Hazel Foot's stunning Pacific Tribute II. The learning process was non threatening and Jenny was an excellent teacher.

On Saturday the session was taught by Yvonne Roberts. We covered aspects of teaching adult students, preparing teaching cv's, effective needs lists, lesson plans, etc. A really useful day with lots of learning points and contributions from all the other students.

Finally on Sunday, Jared Murdoch (who deserves a medal for spending the whole weekend in the company of female quilters!) covered computers and social media. A difficult task when you have a room full of a complete diversity of experience and needs. Jared made the day really useful and interesting for everyone. We all learned loads and will be putting lots of it into practice.

Dinner after the Aotearoa Quilters AGM

My thanks to the Aotearoa Quilters committee for putting in so much hard work to organise this event. As the national association for quilters in New Zealand, they are doing a fantastic job of preserving and encouraging the art of quilting. If you are not a member I encourage you to join, or at least get your local group to join with a group membership. The link is on the left hand side of my blog.