🧵 November 5, 12 & 19, 2026 | 9:00 AM–4:00 PM
Create a stunning Shaded 4-Patch Scrap Quilt Top while learning the fundamentals of colour, value, and quilt design! Over three full-day sessions, Joan Hug-Valeriote, an award-winning quilt / textile artist will guide you through fabric selection and value sorting, a fun fabric swap, and construction of shaded 4-patch blocks using the Al Miller template method for accurate piecing.
By the end of the workshop, you’ll have designed and assembled your quilt top and gained the skills to complete your quilt at home. Suitable for confident beginners to intermediate quilters who are comfortable using a rotary cutter and sewing machine.
Participants must bring their own sewing machine and fabrics (50-60 six inch squares of good quality 100% cotton); a detailed supply list will be provided approximately one month before the workshop. Finishing techniques, including quilting and binding, will be discussed but are not expected to be completed during the workshop (unless creating a very small quilt).
Artist Bio
Joan Hug-Valeriote is an award-winning, professional quilt/fibre artist. She is a recognized Ontario Artist who was subsidized by the Ontario Arts Council as a Visiting Artist in Education in Ontario schools over a ten year period. She is an artist member of Studio Art Quilt Associates and also provides longarm quilting services in Guelph, Ontario.
Joan has been sewing since early childhood and has been quilting since 1977 while working in the film business and later teaching French in Toronto schools. Her quilting has been influenced by international travel as well as five years living in Switzerland, France and Spain, and four years in California. Her work has been juried into shows in the U.S., Italy, Switzerland, France and New Zealand as well as national shows in Canada such as the Grand National Quilt Exhibition and the Canadian Quilters’ Association National Juried Show.
While in California, Joan was able to take a number of art quilting classes as well as learning how to do computer-assisted quilt design. She also pioneered an art therapy quilting program for teenage single mothers in Santa Ana . After her return to Canada in 1999, she began accepting commissions, giving workshops and lectures and bought her first longarm quilting machine.
In 2010, Joan became President of the Canadian Machine Quilters’ Association, overseeing a series of workshops in Ontario, sponsored by the Ontario Arts Council as well as a national show of longarm machine-quilted works by members of the CMQA in London, Ontario. She also shepherded the absorption of CMQA , after ten years of existence, into the Canadian Quilters’ Association.
Her body of work includes traditional and contemporary bed quilts, artistic wall-hangings, and wearable art. It ranges from small “almost Amish” pieces to Japanese-style wall-hangings and modern abstracts. She re-interprets much-loved traditional designs and settings, using unconventional forms, placement and colours, often hand-dyeing her own fabrics.
