Virginia Beach - Part Four of our USA Trip & the reason we came.......

We arrived into Virginia Beach a few days ago and settled in at The Founders Inn.
The hotel has a lake & lovely gardens which are illuminated in an evening.

We were there to attend Birds of a Feather Longarm Quilting Convention - three full days of back to back workshops with some of the best tutors around.

The atrium had a quilt display of old & damaged quilt tops which had been rescued by Mary Kerr and quilted by well known quilters.  I found one her done by Claudia Pfeil. (Claudia will be teaching at The Royal Bridlington in December).

The ground floor of the atrium was the show room for Innova and also provided space for Joanne Blade & Kim Diamond to demonstrate their longarm applique technique and recreate last years Birds Quilt.

Tim & I selected different classes to each other to try and learn as much as we could and the next three days we both had back to back classes.

Many people asked me to take lots of pics- so apologies now - there are alot!

I attended -

Divide & Design with Lisa Calle

Fantastic session with Lisa - I learnt so much.

Fill Harmonics with Sue Heinz

Mystical Shapes with Jamie Wallen

 Love this guy!  He talks sense and is genuinely funny.

Advanced Auto Pilot with Nancy Wick

A refresher into some of the other function in AP.

Dancing in the Shadows with Nancy McNally

A drawing & hands on class.  Lots of students who had other makes of longarm - all very impressed with the Innova.

Twisted by Dusty Farrell

Amazing session with this very talented quilter.

Tim attended -

I'm on the Edge - Border Pizazz with Nancy McNally

Nancy is so knowledgeable on her trade and passed on some wonderful ideas

Listen to your Quilt - with Barbara Persing

Thanks Barbara for your six steps . .

Filling in the Spaces with Barbara Persing

Barbara provided some magnificent tuition on fillings for quilts - awesome.

Fill as You Will with Karen Sievert

This was Karens first event and she was incredible, really lively and enthusiastic.  The love she has for her art really came through.

Mastering the Mini with Lisa Calle

Lisa's training was incredible.  She gave some magnificent training and all of the class mates left with a quilt ready to sew.

Sashing that Sizzles with Sue Heinz

Just some of Sue's great work.

Thanks also to Nancy Wick who provided some great insight into the special functions on the Innova and how she looks at designing quilting for patchwork tops.

Michael - one of the main men at ABM (The M in ABM) Innova providing an impromptu maintenance session on the wonderful ABM Immova Longarm.  Michael also invented the very first computerised quilting machine.

Lets talk Quilts - Aren't they magnificent!!

We had a fantastic time at Birds of a Feather and we learnt so much from such great tutors and made many new friends too.  Our Innova dealer was also present and ironically also attended two of the same classes as us, however instead of using this opportunity to start building bridges, she, as we expected she would, just blanked us. This is such a same as ABM are a great company.  Anyway we have now learnt that any customer may choose where they purchase their machine, so we now have many more contacts of reputable dealers. So who knows guys, I may be passing on some of the very many telephone enquiries about the machine we receive.

After a good nights rest we traveled all the next day, heading North to Atlantic City where we chose to spend our last couple of days before catching our flight back to the UK from Philadelphia.

I am really looking forward to getting back to Delboy & Rodney and making some time to 'play'.

www.quiltsandwich.co.uk

Fiona & Tim