Home: Leesburg, Virginia
Julia Graves is a Zoom-experienced lecturer and teacher on a variety of quilting subjects, with a focus on color and design that are applicable to all your future quilts.
Her Amazing Abstracts class teaches how to use color and value to create amazing movement and drama. Her traditional piecing classes that focus on color and value include Tricks with Transparencies, Luscious Luster, Rainbow Drops and Shimmering Triangles. Other fun classes include creating your own gemstone in Gemstone Bling and Color Exploration where we play with color to see the effects we can achieve. She has lectures on Color, Design, Landscape Quilts, Personalizing and Memory Quilts, Community and Faith in Fiber and her very popular My Quilting Journey.
Julia’s two most popular bookings are:
- Color Exploration Lecture – This lecture will discuss how to select beautiful color combinations for your quilts and provide tips on how to fix color combinations that just don’t seem to be working. Includes a slide show and trunk show illustrating classic color combinations and fascinating color illusions.
- Amazing Abstracts Class – Create an abstract quilt that has amazing movement and drama. Go from inspiration to a simple sketch, then have fun “coloring” your sketch with bits of fabric to create a mock-up of your design – see before you sew! The design is gridded and blocks are foundation pieced using an easy sew and flip method with room for creativity and improvisation. Lots of discussion of design principles and how to use color and value to create the drama and desired effects.
Julia started her quilting business, Special Occasion Quilts LLC, in 2007 and teaches, lectures, designs patterns, makes commission quilts, longarms for others and sells & services APQS longarm machines. She won Best Longarm Machine Workmanship Wall Quilt Category at the 2016 Mid-Atlantic Quilt Festival, is a Gem Affiliate teaching the gorgeous gem patterns by MJ Kinman – Textile Artist, has had quilts published in books by Gloria Loughman, Katie Pasquini-Masopust and MJ Kinman, was an Artist in Residence at Empty Spools in 2019, and will be teaching at Empty Spools in 2021 and 2022 and Hudson River Valley Art Institute in 2022.
Julia has been sewing since she was ten and always loved fabric, needle arts and the entire creative process. She did her apprenticeship as a quilter by making a quilt for each of her nieces and nephews (and thinks she should have counted them before making this promise – there were 32!). She has since made more quilts than she can count, many for charity, and is partial to scrap quilts and working with color to achieve amazing results.
Visit her gallery on her website at http://www.soquilts.com. Contact Julia viat email –juliagraves82 @ gmail.com. Julia has videos of her on this page: http://soquilts.com/classes-and-lectures/
Be sure to tell Julia that you found her on The Quilters Calendar!
