Acrylic Ink Adventure

This past weekend I went on an adventure. My mom and I had planned to do an art quilt weekend with Judy Coates Perez for about 6 months. We made all the plans, mom bought all the materials and did lots of planning and communicating with the instructor. On Friday morning, I rolled out of bed, packed up the car and dog and as I was pulling out of the driveway to take Leo to his spaw weekend, Mom called and told me that due to unforeseen circumstances she was not going to be able to make it after all, but my sister had been roped in to take the Acrylic Ink Adventure with me.

I went by my folks' house to pick up all the supplies that mom had packed for us then met up with my sister and headed out to La Grange, TX (known for being the home of the Chicken Ranch from Best Little Whorehouse). The drive down was fantastic. It was about 4 hours of laughing and catching up (Marti and I haven't had any one-on-one time since she came out to visit me in California). We got to the hotel and checked in...and eventually got into the room. We took a short little rest and then headed out to the "Great Expectations Creativity Center", the location of where the workshop was being held. Marti and I had lots of fun coming up with Dickens references as we headed over. Sadly, we got slightly lost. Here are the directions that were provided:

General Directions to Windy Hill Lane: If you came from Highway 71 (which we were), once you are on 159/237, go about 5 miles. You'll see a few green street signs on your right; you'll pass the Jersey Barn and your left, a working oil pump-jack, then two red barns. Windy Hill is just past the second red barn. Turn left. If you reach a little white restaurant (Fishes and Loaves) on your left, you have gone too far.

We found 159/237 and started clocking the 5 miles...with Marti speeding along. We pass one sign that read Dairy Tours, Milk a Cow. I commenting "ooo, better than a wine tour". We then see some signs and one that I thought may have said "Windy Hill" but we kept going. We passed a white building that I thought was a restaurant, but it didn't look open, so we just kept on rolling along. I did ask Marti how far we'd gone and if she could slow down. Her response was "we've only gone a couple of miles, we haven't gone 5 yet". We then didn't see anything...at all...except fields...and no place to turn around. We eventually DID get turned back around because it was agreed by all parties that we had some how missed the turn. (As an FYI, when we left we clocked the distance and it turned out to be around two miles.)

We eventually did make it to Great Expectations, got checked in and set up. We threw the coordinator of the event when we told him that Marti was not Jay, even though she was forced to wear a name tag that had the wrong name all weekend (we did mark through and change the name or just put "NOT" Jay, but still). The class got started and Marti and I dove right into doing something that neither of us had any idea what it was all about. We ended up dying and painting on fabric using Acrylic inks and learned all sorts of new techniques with intentions of coming home and having a "girls' weekend" at Casa ABBA where Marti and I can fill Mom's head with all of our new found knowledge.

Here are pictures of our final "exams" where we used some of the various techniques that we learned. Now there is still work that we will both probably still do on these, but here they are as we left La Grange:

Andrea's Flower Garden

Marti's Texas Boot