My first forays into teaching quilt-related subject matter came in the second half of the 1974 – 1975 school year, coincident to my being enlisted to teach high school art classes in my New Bedford, MA parochial alma mater, replacing my own high school art teacher who’d taken sick earlier that year. I quickly realized that being a high school art teacher wasn’t for me. I had entirely the wrong temperament for it and have ever since admired those who make it their comfort zone. More power to them.

A local community college’s Women’s Center advertised for “crafts” teachers, I saw the notice in my local paper, applied, was hired and assigned a small room with a large folding table, ten chairs, and their blessing. Close to fifty people, all women, showed up for the first announced session. None of them seemed dismayed that the instructor was a man. I was in business. That 1975 group became five different class groups, and for the next five years I invested a lot of time and energy in courses like this, at locations as spread out as the Boston Center for Adult Education, the DeCordova Museum School in Lincoln, MA, the University of Rhode Island Extension Division, and many more. Putting upwards of 25,000 miles a year on our car was soon par for the course.

I give those many workshops students – in the thousands across the decades since – a lot of credit not least for their unfailing enthusiasm in the face of my sometimes out-of-the-box design and color challenges. Many became friends that I remain in touch with to this day. As I developed classes and “designed” specific types of workshops, there was a lot of experimenting, and they were always game. In many instances I was barely one step ahead of them, learning techniques on the fly just days, sometimes hours, before I’d demonstrate my “competency,” such as it was. Most of it was new to us at the time, everyone was engaged and excited, and from it a real community grew and over the decades since, has prospered mightily. If you’re reading this and you were ever in one of those classes or workshops, thank you, thank you.

Once I landed on the workshop circuit, my connection to a number of venues clicked, and I returned to many annually or biennially. One of these was the Craftsummer Program at Miami University of Ohio in the late 70s and early 80s, where (if my memory can be relied on) the photos above were taken. Cut & paste was the standard modus operandi, with students' responses going up on the walls for "critique" once the allotted time was exhausted. Another venue that I returned to over and over was the Brookfield Craft Center in western Connecticut, where warm relationships developed with many return students whose commitment and loyalty buoyed my spirits. These students proved themselves both serious and inventive, and as my strategies evolved and matured, so did their responsiveness. One among them was Ardis James (we shared a family name, though we weren't even distantly related), whose twin blue-green-white "starburst" type design blocks are at the center right in the rightmost photo below. Ardis, with her husband Robert, would one day found the International Quilt Study Center at the University of Nebraska–Lincoln, the forerunner of today's International Quilt Museum.

The sets of block patterns shown in these photos developed in classes at the Brookfield Craft Center, from design project parameters that were in those first years relatively conservative. That is, they hewed to the conventions of the grid and to repeat systems that had governed the ways patchwork had been organized for centuries. Over time, we'd loosen those constraints.

In the photo below, students in a "whole-cloth" quilt design workshop at the Brookfield Craft Center in the early 1980s, shown working on blind contour drawings of northern catalpa tree leaves, ahead of developing linear compositions that would ultimately form the stitched delineation of single-color quilts. I'll always be grateful that they were willing to suspend disbelief and dive in.