Black Friday Sew In Giveaway Announcement

Check out Twitter using the hashtag #BFSI

I have three prizes to giveaway for the Black Friday Sew-in: two patterns and a Design Ratio Tool, which is slightly used.

Feedburner Email option
Feedburner Email option

I don’t know what my schedule will be on Friday and I may not be able to monitor a complicated contest, thus in order to win here, you must be on the email list. Check the sidebar for the Feedburner subscribe widget and enter your email address.

If you already get the blog via email, you are already entered!

Sign up now!

You will nullify your entry if you unsubscribe before I send out the prizes.

I *may* give additional entries to subscribers who leave substantial comments on any recent post.

I will draw the winners on Sunday.

Various & Sundry #14 – Thanksgiving

Fill your mind with gratitude!

Fall Quilt Market and Festival

Pat Bravo posted a recap of Quilt Market on her blog. Great pictures and inspiration. Not tons of words.

Aurifil had several posts on the subject of Quilt Market and Festival. I really liked one with lots of photos from the Carolyn Friedlander booth (or section of a larger booth??) and Anna Maria Horner’s booth. I love the photos from Mickey Dupre’s new book on hexagons. I saw it in a catalog, but did not buy it. The pictures of Kaffe Fassett’s fabrics made into bags and quilts and even a Tuffet are awesome.

Moda put up a few blog posts about Quilt Market and in Two Down, I loved the quilt with all the squares using their new Flow fabric by Brigitte Heitland of Zen Chic. I do love Zen Chic designs. I just wish Moda fabrics didn’t fray so much. The post shows a lanyard pattern by Lazy Girl Designs. It looks like it has some serious hardware!

I noticed lots of darker fabric hues in the pictures this year. Dark blues, sage greens, rust, lots of grey and not the light one that I like. Not my colors. I am reserving judgement, but I think 2016 may be the year I don’t buy as much fabric. HA! We’ll have to wait and see.

Fortunately Minnick & Simpson of Me and My Sister Designs have some great colors as usual. And dots. I will have, at least, a bit of fabric to buy. 😉

There are a whole bunch of blogs gathered in one place that are talking about Quilt Market.

TQS has a video of all of the Houston 2015 the winners. I didn’t watch it so I don’t know if you will need a subscription to watch or not. It looks like it is on their Daily Blog so you can watch for free.

Modern Quilts were shown at Houston as well. I was surprised at one of them: a four patch and Flying Geese quilt called Kitsugi 1 (Medallion) by Alexis Deise. It could has easily have been included in a classic/traditional category IMO

There are many other sites talking about Market and Festival. Take a look.

Websites & Blogs

Frances has a new website for The Off Kilter Quilt.

Kathy has a blog where she posts every day (sound familiar?) or nearly every day. I read a very funny recent post about how well she and Jenny Doan are suited and how they should become best friends.

TextileArtist.org had an interesting article on developing work using sketchbooks. The artist writing is a painter, so there is a little different focus, but we can all gain inspiration and learn techniques from each other. One thing I liked is that Bren Boardman, the artist includes journals, scrapbooks and diaries in her list of ‘sketchbooks’. This makes me happy, because I often have my journal with me, but no sketchbook, so I sketch a design in my journal rather than running to get a sketchbook. I do have doesn’t of sketchbooks that I work in periodically, but I don’t have a regular sketchbook habit. Perhaps I should, but I’ll work on that later. Boardman gives ideas for getting started and ideas for what to include. You don’t have to draw! There are also links to other articles by different artists.

TQS posted a link to an article on Libby Lehman’s continued recovery. She started sewing again!

The Sheldon Cooper quilt is amazing, but it scares me. I can see where the challenge would be attractive, but I couldn’t have it in my house. WHEW! One project I don’t have to put on my to do list.

Maureen shared the Bay Area Book Artists website with me. I feel like I have to make another book before I can go and feel like one of the team. I’ll take some time to explore the site more carefully and I may feel different.

I saw the Tim Holtz fabrics on the Sew Sweetness site and went to look at them on his site. I was surprised to see they were by Coats and Clark. I thought Coats and Clark was a thread company! Expanding their horizons, I guess. I was interested in the design of the site. there are all different ways to navigate and, aside from the sorting designers by first name, the navigation looks really good.

Sandy over at Quilt Cabana Corner has a new feature called Fresh Start Mondays. This past Monday’s issue has a nice embroidery pattern and some other fun things.

Gerre's Dolls
Gerre’s Dolls

My friend, Gerre, showed me a photo of her Mimi Kirchner dolls. She made the ones shown for her crafty friends. You can make some using the PDF pattern on the Purl Bee site. Her dolls have such great personality. I love the ones with tattoos she shows on her most recent post (November 2015). I really like the detail on the dresses. I also like the facial features. They don’t look scary to me.

Patterns & Tutorials

https://instagram.com/p/9L7ngmtJCU/
https://instagram.com/p/9L7ngmtJCU/

Robert Kaufman has a free pattern on their site for this fabulous quilt! The pattern is called Mosaic and is part of the Fragmental fabric pages on the Robert Kaufman site. I am not a fan of the colors, but love the design, which is a variation on the classic Ocean Waves design. It is certainly an appropriate color scheme for Autumn. Don’t you think it would look great in variations of turquoise, sea green and greys?

Need a hostess gift? Want to practice your zippers? Sew Sweetness’ Sara Lawson has a casserole carrier free pattern on her website.

Sew Sweetness’ new Appaloosa Bag looks really great. I love some of the bags that the testers made.

Lucky Spool is starting the Mighty Lucky Quilting Club. It is described as “the first monthly subscription club of its kind that focuses on challenging you with design concepts in the quilt making process. ” There are some big name modern quiltmakers and the cost is $5/month or $50/year. It might be interesting, but I have so much other stuff to do.

Exhibits & Events

Only a few more days to enter QuiltCon. November 30 (YM’s birthday, in case you were wondering) is the last day to enter and their servers might be slammed that day so don’t wait until the last minute. I entered three quilts and hope they all get in.

Kaffe Fassett has an extensive tour of the world. Check his calendar to see if he will be near you. I heard him speak once in Pacific Grove and it was totally worth the cost and the drive.

He will have an exhibit at the San Jose Museum of Quilts & Textiles. The following information is from his calendar:

“Blanket Statements: New Quilts by Kaffe Fassett and Historical Quilts from the Collection of the Quilt Museum and Gallery, York, England

12 March – 28 June 2016

As one of only two U.S. museum venues, this exhibition includes fifteen historic quilts from The Quilters’ Guild Collection, York, England and twenty quilts produced by Kaffe Fassett that were inspired by the designs of the historic quilts.”

Remember Kathy McNeil, who made Song of the Sea, which I posted about in the PIQF post? She has an exhibit coming up in the Spring of 2016 at the LaConner Quilt Museum. in Washington. It is a solo show.

Stanford University’s Cantor Arts Center has digitized its collection. “Students, faculty, scholars and the general public can now visit the museum’s website, type in a title, artist, theme or other search criteria, and see high-quality digital images of the majority of the 45,000-plus objects in the collection. Partial inventories of the museum’s collection have been made since it opened in 1894, but this was the first complete inventory since 1916.” (from ResearchBuzz)

Sew Mama Sew has a report on Sewtopia, an event that happened a few weeks ago in Portland. Lots of photos and I see my friend, Kelly O!, in one of them! I am not so sure I would want to participate in the pajama contest.

I just found about about the North Bay Modern Quilt Group. The North Bay Modern Quilt Guild meets on the 2nd Thursday of every month at 6:30pm at StitchCraft in Petaluma, CA. They were founded in January of 2012 and also have a Facebook page.

The MQG member discount for QuiltCon ends Nov. 30 — so members, if you want your free show pass or discounted lecture and workshop tickets, don’t delay! You must purchase them by Nov. 30th!

Twitter Art Exhibit Call for Artists. This call to artists looks like the art pieces are not returned and donated for charity. The registration form is separate.

An exhibit at the Virginia Quilt Museum about Caryl Bryer Fallert-Gentry and is called 30 Quilts for 30 Years.

EBHQ is preparing for their bi-annual (March 19-20, 2016) show next year by showing the guild raffle quilts at the Celebration of Craftswomen show at the Herbst Pavilion at Ft. Mason in San Francisco, November 27-29, 2016.  It is a three-day craft extravaganza featuring over 150 juried artists.    The guild is so thrilled that they were accepted as an exhibitor and look forward to a great show for the quilts. Go join them–the show runs from 10 am to 5 pm each day.

Fabric, Tools, Shops, Supplies & Embellishments

As I have gone on about repeatedly, I love coloring in coloring books. I have colored all of my life on and off. I am so thankful to Johanna Basford for making it cool again for adults to color. I want her Lost Ocean book, but it seems ridiculous to buy another one when I am only partway through the Enchanted Forest. AND I am not making any progress, because of my injury. It doesn’t keep me from ALSO wanting the new 36 set of Staedler pens that just came out and Johanna is endorsing. Greedy, I know since my set of 20 are perfectly fine.

Denyse Schmidt and Free Spirit have brought back Denyse’s line, Katie Jump Rope.

Articles & Information

Frances pointed out an article called Mainstreams: History seen through the Lens of a Handmade Quilt. I wonder if the organizers of the project started with the NC Quilt Project quilts?

This is a fantastic article about an amazing project that was a precursor to the Pantone color guides. there is a lot of information about the Pantone process, when it started, etc. I really like the way this article is written and there are some high resolution scans of the pages. I was THRILLED to read this article.