That’s Melissa on the left, and Sandy on the right (and I’m the one behind the camera getting the PANO app on my phone to make this picture!)
We’re all set up, we survived Preview night (thanks to all who stopped by with big smiles and hugs!) and we’re ready to show off our stuff some more today!
See you there!
If you’re in SoCal next week, I hope you can squeeze in a visit to the Long Beach International Quilt Festival. It starts Thursday 26th July at 5pm for preview night, and runs through the weekend. Oodles of new quilt stuff for you to touch and take home.
I will be in booth 1542 – at the back end of the 1500 aisle, close to the food court! Pop by and say Hi!
I’m bringing a few new patterns with me, and some kits and fabrics for them too. I will also be carrying the latest darling of the quilt world, Generation Q Magazine! (full disclosure here, the team that made this little gem are friends of mine, and I’m tickled pink to show off their stuff).
And last, but not least… new buttons! Pardon the hasty cell phone image, but here are the latest crop, available for the first time at Long Beach. I re-printed the Ultimate Power Tool in ORANGE especially for this weekend only, so come get yours!
See you there!
It’s all hands on deck as the days between here and the International Quilt Festival in Long Beach at the end of the month slide by. New patterns are working their way to completion through the efforts of my readers and testers (heroes, every one of ‘em). And then there are the photos to shoot…
Today I shot a couple of rounds of photos of my latest, and to date, most ambitious pattern yet – Blanket Statement. It’s a full alphabet of paper-pieced patterns, right down to the numbers and punctuation. I’ve been noodling on this since last year (my sketchbook says April 20th 2011!) and it’s ready to launch at Long Beach. It’s coming out in two versions to start: one on a clam-shelled CD of PDF files in a trusty pattern bag, and the other as a spiral bound book that will lay flat on a copier for all you folks that don’t like mixing computing with quilting! I will tackle a downloadable option in August.
Why make it paper-pieced? Because it’s the best technique for the job! It was important to me that this alphabet be readable (the first rule of font craft) and so the design demanded some smaller pieces to round out the curves of the round letters. Doing these with templates would be migraine inducing… the whole point of this sewing and quilting game is to have fun, right? While paper-piecing might demand a little more fabric than going the template route, it more than makes up for that in ease of construction (and you don’t have to draft all those templates). You’re not sure how to paper-piece? Well, stop by the booth in Long Beach and the aforementioned heroes and I will show you how!
In the meantime, here’s a picture of the alphabet in all its chunky-funky sass, with Lily, a sweet young lady (and niece of my dear friends Paula and Neil) who graciously offered to model with it in the bright California sun today.
