Back to work!

The car is finally completely empty of boxes from Festival. I have to say my studio is a bit more organized but I have really just transfered everything from the car to the floor in the studio! Today my goal is to get the floor empty but that could take all day.

We will be putting up colored photos of Sophie today and are ready to post the next segment for your May project list. Jeanne is hard at work on the next 3 months' worth of designs-Sophie just gets better and better.

I am sharing photos of Jeanne's Sophie started on peach background fabric. Isn't she sweet with blond hair????

Quilt Festival continued

I was talking with a quilting buddy last night about Festival and could hear myself say "We saw so many nice people and loved all the booths". It was true-everywhere we looked we saw quilt displays that gave us so much to think about. I do think we saw more embroidery combined with quilting than I remember from prior Houston Int'. Quilt Markets. Perhaps that was because this Festival was not for quilt shop owners to order patterns and fabric but for stitchers like you and me.

I am sharing 3 pictures of booths that we really fell in love with. Maybe you can see the name on the banners-if not, let me know which you like and I"d be happy to share the names and cities so you can contact these great quilt stores and see what they might have for you.

I've still got 2 big boxes in the car that I haven't unpacked. I need about 4 hours in my studio to get everything put away. That time won't be available until Saturday but Jeanne is way ahead of me.

Downloaded pictures!

Finally-the missing cord for the camera has been found. I have, scary, downloaded the pictures from Chicago and will be sharing some across the next few days. First here is a picture of our booth and then one of Shannon of Treasured Threads-a friend from the Redwork Stitchers group. More to come-

Home at last

After a record fast tear down of our booth, the two of us hopped into our car and started home from Chicago. We had good help from our booth buddies across the way- pictures to come soon! We drove 3 hours in the pouring rain through lots of construction. But we are home safely with lots of great memories and new friends! I'll download the pictures tomorrow and promise to post. Now time for bed in my own sweet bed!

Quilt Festival Report

Well, it's day 2 of Quilt Festival and we are ready for action. Yesterday saw us hand out all of our flyers by 3 pm. That means that we had seen 500 people in 5 hours! We were amazed by that many people on the first day of the Festival. Jeanne ran back to our hotel room-where we had set up a printer!- and started printing more flyers. We met some great people and they all were very excited to hear about Sophie and our block of the month concept. Everyone loved her wild, sassy look. We also got some great ideas for future stories about her.

Our new patterns-Button Faces, A Kind Woman, Jingle Bells Pillow, and all the yo yo patterns-were of interest and we sold quite a few. So far, we'd have to say it has been a great start.

Time for breakfast and then we hope to walk the floor for an hour and see what other folks have before we open again at 10. I'll be back later.

Off!

The car is packed to the point where nothing else can go in because I won't be able to see out the back window. I don't think we have forgotten anything major. Thanks to Jenny for putting together the 500 handouts tied with red Raffia. It was great to have some help at the last minute with those. I put my little stash of "mad" money in the bottom of my purse just in case we see something we just have to have. Wish us luck!

We hope to blog from the hotel. Later friends!

We're off to Quilt Festival!

Starting this afternoon we are officially packing the car for an early morning take off. I hope the GPS can get us there in one piece-the car is going to be SO full of patterns and kits that it may have to drive itself!

Please stop by and say hi if you are going to be at the Festival. Remember-our booth number is 2112. We'd love to chat and share our designs with our buddies. I'll have a camera with us so will plan to post some pictures next week.

Happy Easter!

Just got back from Easter Egg festivities. I hope everyone had a great day. We had a small Egg hunt here for 2 grandchildren then went to my sister-in-law's for lunch and another egg hunt. What fun! 48 eggs at my house and 148 at the next stop. Then on to see the final 2 grandkids and drop off baskets. Chocolat es for everyone!

Jeanne and I are down to the last 4 days before we head south for Chicago. Of course we are now playing the "hindsight is golden" game of having second thoughts about how many patterns and kits we should be bringing. I don't think there is ever a way to make the right decision. At least we are smart enough this time to take a printer and laptop with us so we can print more copies of patterns if we need to!

Kits, Kits, and more kits!

Last night I cut the last of the kit fabric up and turned it over to Jeanne this morning for assembly. We have 6 kits to offer at the Quilt Festival-A Kind Woman (new pattern), Button Faces (new pattern), Jingle Bell Pillow (new pattern), Garden Bunnies, and 2 versions of our Pincushion Treats-one in wool felt and one in 1930's reproduction fabrics. We're pretty excited about these kits and think we've priced them pretty reasonably considering they include the pattern and various items that help with the pattern-like the jingle bells needed for the pillow, buttons for Button Faces, and have even included the base for the Pin Cushion Treats! (Of course, it was no punishment to eat all the ice cream that filled the containers we took tops from to use as the pin cushion base!!!) We're thinking of offering more kits on our web site-what do you think???

I have a 3 day weekend because of Easter so will try to finish up all the stitching that is yet to do. I hope to get our 2nd version of our Care Quilt back from the machine quilter this week yet so I can sit and add the binding while watching tv this weekend.

We hope your Easter is going to be full of sunshine and smiles-

Booth #2112

It's been great to hear that some of our stitching buddies are planning to be in Chicago for the Quilt Festival. We're going to be in booth #2112 and are excited to hear that some of you hope to stop by. All of your positive thoughts are so nice! Sometimes it's hard to envision who is really stitching our designs so it's wonderful to have a chance to hear from some of you.

Tomorrow we plan to try to pack my car and see if there is room for us! You would think we would be pretty good at this packing for market stuff but it's always a challenge. And since we are taking quite a few kits of new patterns that means some of the box shapes aren't necessarily going to fit together smoothly. When we fly to Houston we are SO constricted by what can fit in a suitcase. I would think it would be easier to just throw things in the back seat...but we'll see tomorrow!

I'll be posting pictures of a couple of our newest designs over the next couple of days-just a sneak preview for you before we introduce these new patterns at Festival. For those who aren't able to get to Chicago, I'll include the update when the patterns are available on web site for sale.