AUBURN - Quilters from across the Northeast flocked to the Schweinfurth Memorial Art Center this week for five days of intense and creative instruction from internationally acclaimed quilter Nancy Crow.

Students have traveled from New York, Pennsylvania, Maryland, New Jersey, Massachusetts and Washington, Shweinfurth executive director Donna Lamb said.

“No one else is doing the same kind of things that she is doing in art quilts today,” Carol Soderlund, one of the workshop's students, said. This workshop was Soderlund's fourth with Crow. Normally, the Geneva resident travels to Ohio, where Crow teaches. “It was great to have this class close to home.”

Rebecca Nichols traveled from Baltimore, Md., to have a chance to work with the woman whose books helped her teach herself to quilt. “Nancy wants to free you up, but she treats it more like a studio class for drawing or painting,” Nichols said.

Crow said that she pushes her students to work quickly and make a finished product that she can critique.

“These women have to handle color value, shape and lines while making sure their work will lie flat when sewn together, Crow said. ”They have risen up to what I have assigned, and it has been a lot of work.

“I love this exercise, it forces them to put up so much color so quickly,” she said of the class' final project to design and piece together a quilt in only a day. On Friday, the last day of the workshop, the quilters were rushing with finishing touches before the afternoon's critique.

“She may see something that she doesn't like and she may tell you, but you don't feel like a failure,” Kathryn Miranda, of Syracuse, said. “She lets you know that your art is worth it, that you are worth it.”

This class is an expansion of “Quilting by the Lake,” an annual two-week quilting conference that the Schweinfurth puts on in the summertime, Lamb said. The museum wants to have classes like this year-round. While the program is starting with quilting and textile work, since the museum is already known for work in that area, but would like to see the program expand to other areas, she said.