Janome Education Summit 2018

Earlier this week I drove up to a lovely Marriot conference center in a wooded business park in the northern end of New Jersey. I was there to teach quilting with rulers and the use of rulers when quilting on the Janome 9400 to a huge room full of Janome Educators and Janome Artisans and influencers. In other words, I was teaching the folks who teach others about using Janome machines!


Kimberly Einmo, the new Janome spokesperson, kicked things off with a great presentation about her creative career and a class on making flying geese using her ruler, fabric and pattern. Y'all know I'm a bit challenged when it comes to piecing. Piecing in public? Well, let's just say, while it looked OK, I was slooooow compared to all the other quilters.



I did make pretty rainbow confetti!


She's so incredibly nice and she stuck around to take my class on quilting with rulers. Janome was giving out little pins throughout the event and this was the one given out for my class! LOVE it. So true.


It was fabulous teaching a class in ruler work in which everyone had the same machine, same ruler foot, and rulers. Probably eliminated about 40 minutes of my material on what foot and ruler thickness needed. Also, the ruler mode setting on the Janome 9400 (and the 15000) means I don't have to keep repeating "Remember, lower the foot before you lower the needle! Raise the needle before you raise the foot."


I had a custom panel created for the class as there were some 30+ people in the group. If you're quilting with rulers, you really need places to put the ruler against, so a printed/marked/pieced top is really the best to work on and this saved me a lot of time.


We used the new Janome Ruler Work Kit for our rulers too. This meant coming up with different shapes and designs than I usually use.


What was fabulous is that several of the educators and Janome Artisans were not quilters and so they were new to free motion and still did quite well. Being a group of educators and experienced quilters too, we had several folks take off and run with the technique, doing their own thing. Janome Educator based in Texas, Terry Mingee (below), was actually a "fan" of mine and it was so nice to meet him.


Nicole of Modern Handcraft took her rulers to the project she made in Kimberly's morning class. She was so enthusiastic and sweet. She was off and running with ruler work. She also may have inspired me to play with hexagons.....



One of these people was Sarah Ann Smith whose book, Threadwork Unravelled, I read and studied as I was first learning to free motion quilt, so I was pretty excited!She's an amazing quilter and has been a Janome Artisan for quite some time.


I was also excited to finally meet Liz Thompson of the Janome Canada blog, Janome Life. Her blog post on the Janome ruler foot combination has brought me quite a few new readers and followers over the years. We've come close at a few Janome events over the years, but it wasn't until now that we were able to meet. She also did a great (and hilarious) demo on the Janome Quilt Binder Set.


I wasn't able to attend the rest of the Summit and had to get back to Sew Simple, so I missed the rest of the activities. But my several of my fellow attendees and I are sharing links to each other's posts this week. Click through the links (more at the end of this post) to see more of the attendees and their take on the event.

It was truly an honor to be asked to teach the teachers for Janome and to meet and teach so many other wonderful folks who have also made it their business and calling to teach, encourage, and create.


Kimberly Einmo: https://www.kimberlyeinmo.com/the-2018-janome-education-summit
Nicole at Modern Handcraft
The Janome America blog has a post on the event. (Or will have it up soon)
Joanna at KustomKwilts has a great overview of the whole event!
Sarah Ann Smith is doing a series of posts on the event. I'll post the links as I get them.
        Part one

I'll continue to add links as they become listed.
Jessica VanDenburgh of  The Straight Stitch also posted and you should go see what she thinks of my class.


BTW, this is not what I expected to see out my room window in northern New Jersey! How nice and peaceful.