Pictorial Quilts at Market

Isn't this GORGEOUS? Pictorial quilts are my favorite types of quilts and there were some absolutely gorgeous ones at this quilt market.

I really like the pictorials that are all fabric without painting on fabric. Somehow when it's painted, it's not really a quilt anymore to me, it's a painting . . . I'm sure I will incite all kinds of reactions with that statement!

This is a close up of the rock to the left. The piecing is amazing!

The wave on this quilt was AMAZING! Look at the piecing/applique in the close up.

Look at the thread painting detail here.

Someday when I have nothing else that absolutely has to be done right then, I'm going to pull out all the pictures I've taken & saved for pictorial quilts and I'm actually going to START one!

Until next time.

Greetings!

My whirlwind trip of Houston & Quilt Market is over & I'm glad to be home - even if it is a heck of alot colder here than it was in TX! A "light" frost is predicited tonight - yikes!

Market was wonderful as usual. It was also a brain drain as usual! New fabrics, new patterns, new pattern companies, new fabric companies, new techniques and just an almost overwhelming canophy of sights, sounds & colors - that's quilt market.

This is the front of the George Brown Convention Center where market is held every fall. At the moment, it is hosting Quilt Festival, a huge quilt show open to the public.

And this is the view from one of the portholes looking onto the convention floor. What you are seeing is about 1/5th of the show. My plan of action at market is to walk the entire show the first day and just look - ok, I only got to the fourth booth before I was ordering something, but it's good to have a plan! I started walking the show floor at 9:30 Friday morning, I did stop for lunch , and finished at row 2300 at almost 6 o'clock. And yes, my grand plan of just looking the first day fell completely apart by the end of the first row!

So what were my impressions of market?

Redwork & embroidery is still strong & I found lots of new patterns that will arrive soon, some already have. I found a new designer who had the cutest wallhangings & pillows. I'm stitching this one now and have pumpkin buttons & leaves coming to compliment it. Click here to see the pattern.
The same designer also had this wallhanging/pillow called Flowers Tall - Flowers Small. It will be perfect for spring. Click here for a close up.

Isn't this the cutest dress? It's made from a T-shirt! The pattern has toddler sizes & it's really easy. Sweet Tea Dress pattern - click here. There were quite a few patterns for babies & toddlers clothing, look for some new ones from Jackie Clark to arrive soon.

Purses were also EVERYWHERE at market. New pattern companies had some great new ones that will be arriving soon and I bought more than a few of Penny Sturgis's newest creations. They'll also be arriving soon.

Fabrics ran the gamut - colorful jewel tones, reproductions, calm blues & tans, batiks in every shade & color. And yes, I ordered Christmas 09 fabrics already! Yikes! Two new lines are coming from two friends of mine - both named Karen and both designing for Timeless Treasures. Karen Snyder, my fall market roomie has a new 30's line coming in Dec and also a new line of redwork fabrics. Karen Montgomery has a really calm, cool blue & tan line coming that I'm going to cheat and do whatever she does out of it.

One of the nicest parts of quilt market for me is to see friends in person that I chat with online and on the phone with during the rest of the year. It's nice to see expressions & laugh in real time rather than just read notes or chat on the phone. This group I've surrounded myself with are a bunch of amazing women, who I am blessed to call my friends & colleagues. Some of my best ideas have either come from them or been polished by them & I came home with some beauties this time too! Look for some exciting new things to happen in the new year at QP!

Until next time.

HandiQuilter Craziness!

Last weekend we hosted the first ever HQ hands-on seminar outside of Utah. It was a test of sorts to see how it would go over - and it went over big! We had a great time & everyone learned quite a bit. Gina, our territory manager, was the educator for this test.

This is the Saturday group, all but one owned an HQ15 and the 12th student had claimed one of the machines for sale.

This is the Sunday group - 5 had machines already and 7 were seeing what all this HQ craze was about. Two went home as HQ owners/devotees!

Gina lectured/demoed on threads, needles, tensions, pantographs, free hand style, maintenance & more! Attendees had time for hands on experience too.

We want to thank Gina for coming & giving such wonderful seminars and we're so thrilled, we're going to do it next spring too! Stay tuned!

Traveling is not for sissies!

I don't know who said hitting the road and sleeping in strange beds made for a "restful" vacation. Now my idea of a vacation is to stay home and have a masseuse and manicurist come to the house! I like to travel but boy do I like to come home and sleep in my own bed!

We started off August at home but headed to St. Louis on the 16th for Baby Lock Tech - to see the new machines. This is the Ellissimo - the new top of the line machine. We had training on it & a review of Masterworks software the first day, the second day was training on the new 18" mid arm quilting machine - the Jewel and then a class on merchandising and another on embroidery seminars.

Then a race to the airport to catch a 7:30 flight home - it was late. Ugh! Never try to fly into Newark at night, they start backing up about 1pm. The TSA guy in St. Louis cheerfully told me the previous night's 7:30 flight didn't leave till midnight! We made it home in time to fall into bed and then up early to start the washing machine to get ready to take off for Switzerland at 6pm! I was looking forward to the 7 hour plane ride!

Switzerland was breath taking! Flowers everywhere! We trained on the new 830 machine and ate chocolate everywhere we went. This is Jim & I at the Bernina factory in Steckborn.

We took a train ride - the highest cog wheel train in Europe - to the top of the mountain and went out on the glacier. It was COLD! We were at 11,000 feet above sea level.

This was taken inside the glacier. We mailed Ann & Bob a postcard from the highest post office in Europe. I hope they get it!

Pam Hayes from Hayes Sewing Center in DE, was shopping for chocolate cows in the chocolate factory and found some. The merchandising in this store was great - it enticed me to buy but the aroma of chocolate would have been enough! I ordered some 830 chocolates as bribes for buying an 830 - of course if we don't sell as many as I bought, someone is just going to have to eat them . . . .

And just around the corner from the chocolate shop was THE most gorgeous house & gardens. If you look closely into that Eden, there is a tiny little pond and ONE chair. The village only has 300 or so people in it so the street isn't that busy - our tour bus was a sensation I think! - it was the perfect garden to relax in.

The details made the trip. This was our dessert one night on the way home from Steckborn. Bernina thought of everything.

Including the men who welcomed us to the closing dinner - each one represented one of the Cantons in Switzerland.

I'm glad to be home but next weekend we head back to Gloucester and then into Boston to Fenway. The Sox are playing the Devil Rays and we have tickets courtesy of our boys. I'll post pictures if we don't get rained out.

Until next time.

Where does time go?

Where does time go? I spent the afternoon in my garden clipping off all the spent daylily stems & wondering how it could be that my orange daylilies - tiger lilies my Dad called them - have almost gone by as have my Shasta Daisies. It seems like I was just drooling over Burpees seed catalog looking at perennials and the garden was tucked in tight for the winter.

And time is flying by too - my niece Carla is being married a week from tomorrow. How the heck did she get old enough to be married???

I made her ring bearer's pillow which my great nephew Zack will carry down the aisle and hopefully not lose the rings on the way there. When I offered to make it, I envisioned stitching silk embroidery flowers and a heart with Carla and Danny's initials in soft, romantic colors. I should have known better. Carla's colors are black and white. How the heck was I supposed to make something soft and romantic from black and white????

So I hemmed and hawed and tried to get her to let me add one color - "No colors Aunt Debbie" and finally came up with this last week. (Plenty of time - the wedding isn't until the 18th!") I wrapped it and Jim mailed it on Tues. She should get it tomorrow or Sat. I hope they like it. The black bow is actually a bridal fabric with crystals on it to give it a little pizzaz.

I made a band on the back for Zack to slip his hands through so that he wouldn't be tempted to carry it like a football. I also put a white ribbon through the knot of the black bow to tie the rings to in case they lose their minds and actually let Zack carry the rings down the aisle on the pillow. Zack is 7, his two cousins, Jordan is 8 and Faith is 6 & they are flower girls. He'll do fine, Jordan will be very serious and Faith will float down the aisle. Zack is my nephew Arthur's son and Jordan and Faith are my niece Jennifer's daughters.

Oh did I mention Carla and Dan's dogs will be part of the wedding party??? This should be a hoot!

The day after the wedding will be a slave labor day at my Mom's. Children of all ages are being drafted to help haul, weed and paint. There will be some grumbling but there will be food involved so grumbling will be kept to a minimum. The family will be together and it will be nice to laugh and tease and talk. I'm looking forward to it.

If the dogs are actually in the wedding - I'll post a picture.

Until next time.

Just one little thing . . .

A local chain store closed all it's location by us. The Rag Shop was where you went to get sewing notions like zippers, bra extenders, etc. You didn't really go there to get fabric anymore, they had less and less and more and more seasonal "junk". Which is why they went under in my opinon. Anyway, we had so many people coming in and asking for zippers, I decided to put in a small zipper display. Simple right?

Wrong. Who would have thought that a 26" deep by 30" wide display wouldn't just slip right into a 4800 square foot display floor????

The display came the day before we closed for the NJ state quilt show. The Wednesday after, I decided to move stuff around in the notions section to slip the zipper display right in. It couldn't take more than an hour or so right?

Wrong - two hours while the shop was opened only convinced me that the whole notions department needed to be rearranged, which meant moving thre reds and pinks, which meant moving the blues & purples, then the browns and blacks, then the yellows and greens and at that point why not the nauticals and baby sections too?????

I should have had the camera because at 10 pm I would say the store was littered with 3,000 bolts of fabric that had no homes. By midnight most of it was back in it's new home on freshly washed fabric racks (why does fabric create so much dust???) and only the baby section and the nautical sections were trashed. Back at 8am Thurs morning and we were actually almost done by the time we opened at 10am. We finished up at noon and hauled our tired bodies home to lay in the shade on what was supposed to be our day off. HA!

Once the major stuff was moved - fabric units, notions displays and fabrics - that meant the store still had to be "fluffed" which means news displays. That's the fun part. Here are some pictures of the store redo - come visit us & see the rest!

Till next time.

Goofing Off

Everyonce in awhile, you just have to goof off - ditch everything you are supposed to be doing and do something else. My friend Sandy Brawner, who owns Quilt Country in TX, gave me a pattern to try when we were at Quilt Market. It's called Four Simple Squares. It looked really neat and Sandy said it was really easy . . . .

So today, instead of doing paperwork - the bane of my existance! - I took some fabric out of the sale room and started the pattern.

Now I have at LEAST three redwork projects going, a pretty quilt with a scalloped border that just needs the bias binding stitched together & put on and who knows how many other projects going already . . . Did I want to do any of them? Nope! So what's a girl to do? Start another project!

The piece on the right is the fabric that all the blocks on the left came from! Aren't they cool? I actually read and followed the directions - great pictures by the way - and stitched all of these blocks and a few more in just about an hour.

I can tell you they are addicting. You sit and turn the pieces and get all kinds of neat patterns!

Here's a closeup of some of the blocks. I love simple things that look really hard! These are actually four patches!

I do have the pattern up on the website

http://www.quiltingpossibilities.net/ and if you are in the area of the shop - look for a class in July or August.

Till next time.