Quilting (and Cracking Up) with Joe the Quilter

It came to pass that Joe Cunningham, aka Joe the Quilter, who in addition to being a professional quilter also travels around the country, lecturing and giving workshops, was invited to speak to one of my quilt groups, the Farmington Valley Quilters.  Joe's a member of that rare species, the male quilter, and he also happens to play a pretty good blues guitar.  Check out his site: http://www.joethequilter.com/
So, because Joe is married to my husband's cousin, Carol Werner LeMaitre, who runs a Pilates studio in San Francisco (check it out, http://sanchezstreetstudios.com/), my husband Joe Rubin and I were thrilled to have Joe the Quilter stay with us for his Connecticut visit, one of many stops in the Northeast on his current three-week tour.  We relished the chance to have some one-on-one with him.
Joe spoke to the Farmington Valley Quilters on the evening of Wednesday, May 15, and though I neglected to take photos of him as he spoke and showed his quilts, I can at least show you a photo of Simsbury's Eno Hall, where we Quilters hold our meetings.

And I can at least tell you a story that Joe told as he told us of his adventures as a quilter.  For example, he told us about using his teenage sons' bluejeans for one project, and finding on one of them, written in Sharpie, "Jules is a slut." 
But my favorite story was about the day when Joe was giving a workshop in which his mother was one of the participants.  The mission of the class was to create some kind of rectilinear patch arrangement.  But Joe's mother was working on a turtle.  When he asked her why, she answered, "Well, you never listened to me."
After cracking up the quilters on Wednesday evening, Joe on Thursday gave a workshop on a project called the Fantasy Four Patch.  It would produce 50 to 56 blocks, each 6-1/2 inches square, which could then be made into...whatever.
I chose these fabrics for my project:

There must have been at least a dozen participants in the class.  Joe explained how we would cut our fabric across the grain into 20 strips of varying widths ranging from 5-1/2 inches down to 1-1/2 inches, then sew the strips together into pairs, cut the pairs into prescribed widths, and put them together in a way that formed 48 to 50, 6-1/2 inch squares.  He serenaded us on guitar while we worked...a perk I've enjoyed in no other quilting workshop.

People in the class seemed to be having fun:

Then it was time for Joe to explain how to put the completed squares together: 

...and whether to do it randomly or according to some sort of pattern.

I still haven't decided about mine.  I finished the blocks at home last evening, after Joe the Quilter drove off to visit friends in Stamford and Brooklyn.  I did pile my squares into groups of sames, though, in case I want to get all anal and come up with some sort of a pattern for them:

The little post-it notes are telling me how many I have of each kind of square.  But I think I'm just going to mix them up and sew them together randomly and await some happy serendipity.

Thanks, Joe the Quilter!