Every year C&T selects a couple of quilting awards to sponsor in order to express our gratitude and appreciation to all the talented quilters out there inspiring us with their beautiful work. This year we decided to sponsor an award at the 25th Anniversary AQS Quilt Show and Contest in Paducah, Kentucky. The show and contest took place the last week of April. We sponsored the Large Wall Quilt: Pictorial Category and were amazed by the incredible entries.
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Thanks to everyone who played along in the April Design Challenge – your creature creations were all adorable! We had 47 entries – a terrific turnout!
The winner (selected at random) of our $100 prize package is Marilyn from Arizona. She posted several animal-themed projects that she sketched and illustrated. The one that was selected is a board book page featuring Punky the Cat which she created for a round-robin art project with her Yahoo Group. Congratulations!
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And now for the details of our May Design Challenge!
Stronger than woven fabric,
More powerful than paper,
Able to burn from tall candles in a single pass.
Look, look over here!
Is it paper?
Is it fabric?
No, it’s LUTRADUR!
Yes, it’s Lutradur® – a unique art surface from our own planet that came to C&T with powers and abilities far beyond those of regular art supplies. Lutradur – it can change the course of mixed media, enhance scrapbook layouts with it’s bare surface, and when disguised as Cotton Fabric, mild-mannered material for great quilts and textile art, fights the never-ending battle for Texture, Color and the Artistic Way.
You are going to LOVE this stuff! Create any craft or piece of art using Lutradur – greeting cards, journals, quilts, wallhangings, ATC’s, paintings, scrapbook layouts, sculpture…the possibilities are endless. Lutradur sheet packs are available now – check with your favorite art or craft store, or you can order online from us. The sheet packs include both weights and you can even run it through your inkjet printer! You may be able to find it on the bolt in your local fabric store, too.
Get some inspiration from our “I Love Lutradur” Flickr group and also from Lesley Riley‘s book, Fabulous Fabric Art with Lutradur.
Oh the Places I've Been quilt - by Lesley Riley
Her Heart collage painting - by Claudine Hellmuth
You can win a fabulous C&T prize package valued at $100!
In this economy many of us are finding ourselves more wallet-conscious than we used to be. You’ve begun to bargain shop, if not made an oath to limit your spending to the bare necessities. Easy Stitching with Buttons, Beads and Braids includes 21 quick and easy projects that will transform your home and wardrobe, by showing you how to turn basics into designer pieces and “old and boring” stuff into “fresh and new” fabulousness. The book includes a bunch of techniques in everything from making floral embellishments from rick-rack scraps to stitching chain stitch and the french knot. You’ll learn how to attach buttons, applique, and embroidery.
For a chance to win post a comment here or on our Facebook page (where this blog post will show up in the feed) and tell us about a favorite embellishment and how you’ve used it to dress something up.
One lucky winner will receive a free copy of Easy Stitching on Monday morning, May 18th. We’ll pick one commenter at random and announce the winner later that day. GOOD LUCK!
Comments will be closed at 9am PST on Monday 5/18/09
For those of you who aren’t yet in the know, C&T Publishing authors are big in the blogosphere. Here’s a little bit about some of our blogger authors and links to some of the gems they’ve recently posted to their blogs:
Laura West Kong is the author of Fast, Fun & Easy® Fabric Cover-Button Jewelry, a September 2009 release. She designs quilt patterns and fiber art, but has dabbled in many other crafts as well– she even made chili pepper piñatas for Cinco de Mayo! Check out this great Sew-n-Go tip she recently posted to her blog, Adventures of a Quilting Diva. I knew there had to be a use for empty dental floss containers!
Terrie Sandelin, author of Miniatures in Minutes, is the queen of miniature quilts. She just posted a great new project that uses the Pyramid Triangle foundation from Miniatures in Minutes to her website— scroll to the bottom of her Projects page to download the instructions for making the below Stacked Diamonds miniature quilt. Isn’t it pretty? Also, I love this recent post on her blog, Bits and Pieces, which offers up a bunch of great uses for your completed mini quilts. Apparently these little guys are addicting!
Rayna Gillman, author of Create Your Own Hand-Printed Cloth, is a mother and a professional artist who teaches surface design all over the U.S. This recent post on her blog Studio 78 Notes shows some fantastic work by students she challenged with a piece of pink fabric. Challenge really can be the mother of inspiration and creativity…
Becky Goldsmith and Linda Jenkins (otherwise known as Piece O’ Cake Designs) have a new book, Appliqué Outside the Lines coming out this July, bringing the number of POC books in our current catalog to a whopping 10. I love their garden-inspired quilt designs, patterns, and fabrics and they frequently post great content to the Piece O’Cake blog as well as their website, such as The easy way to hang a quilt and projects Wedding Birds and Cupcake Stand.
You can see the full list of C&T author bloggers here on our Links page. On every blog you’ll find some outstanding examples of their work— happy exploring!
I’ve posted about my Saturday garage sale hunt obsession before so I thought I would start a weekly entry of what treasures I found….
Guess What’s inside?
It’s like a box of candy…one red skein is missing, but it’s almost too darn yummy to even think of using any of them.
There are 120 of them (okay 119) and I also found the booklet from 1971 that advertised these promotional boxes of new wool skeins for $40!
Garage sale price…$5 for the box.
I had a bunch of flannel scraps left over from 2 quilts I had made for my son and my husband. The quilts were fun—very scrappy with many “manly” plaids in primary colors, but now what to do with all the leftovers? I was tired of all those plaids, so a third quilt had to be fast, easy, and most of all, it had be made with just the leftovers I had—no buying of fabric for this quilt. Without much idea of where I was going with this, I sewed together a bunch of blocks. When I arranged them, I didn’t like the blocks right next to each other so I added navy blue sashing and border to separate all the busyness of the plaids. (Okay, I admit it, I did have to buy a little fabric for the sashing and border.) When I finished the quilt, it needed something more. I added some buttons, but it still needed something so I decided to use red perle cotton to do big stitches down the center of the sashing and around the border.
I am not great at keeping my lines straight or my 1/4″ long stitches even, but that is where our Inchie Ruler Tape came to my rescue. I just stuck the tape down the center of the sashing and stitched away, using the evenly spaced marks along the edge of the tape as my guide so I could sew evenly and straight.
It worked great and made the job much quicker. I am happy with the results, and I even like this “leftovers” quilt better than the first two I made.
Just a word of caution about stitching with perle cotton through flannel—it is nearly impossible to sew through 2 layers of flannel and batting with such heavy thread. I had already machine quilted around the blocks so I used the big stitches as embellishment. I sewed the perle cotton only through the top layer of flannel and caught the batting. It looks good and was not nearly as hard as trying to actually quilt all the way through the layers.
Congratulations to lindaschiffer who won last week’s giveaway! She will be receiving her very own copy of Gift Box Studio Life.
Thank you to all the readers who shared their ideas for filling these gift boxes. No need to explain why chocolate was the most popular content mentioned!
As a special thanks to our blog readers, for the next two weeks you can get 20% off your purchase of Gift Box Studio Life. Simply mention discount code WG25017 when you place your order with C&T via phone (800.284.1114) or at our web site (enter discount code where noted during checkout) on or before May 18, 2009.
A creative life is filled with challenges and rewards, puzzles and curiosities. This ongoing series of poems attempts to express the “Aha”s and “What if”s, the deep ponderings and casual observations of an inquiring mind trying to make sense of reality. May it serve, for you, as a bit of “Everyday Inspiration” along your own creative path.
View the book trailer for Rebekah Meier’s new release, Fabric Art Collage.
NAMTA’s Board of Directors hosts a President’s Reception at each show – this year it was held at the Kentucky Derby Museum at Churchill Downs. I am no horse racing aficionado, but even I couldn’t ignore how rich with history the Derby is. They showed a beautiful documentary about the Derby on an incredible 360-degree movie screen that encircles the ceiling of the main hall. The museum is beautiful and the reception was grand…wonderful food, drink and conversation flowed freely.
Speaking of conversation, you should have seen how many art materials manufacturers and retailers (myself included) were out in the Finish Line Courtyard, trying to chat up a retired racehorse named Perfect Drift (who earned over 4.7 million dollars, by the way) and a miniature horse named Winston. Both horses were confined to their stables…Winston was shy and stayed away from the door, but I think Perfect Drift would have talked to us if he could!
Oh, Wilbur….so anyway, day 2 at the show was great! We demo’ed ink jet transparency transfers with matte medium on our Board Books and Canvas Books, and we also painted on our Blank Board Blocks. I visited with the guys at We R Memory Keepers and discovered their new Chomper tool which cuts perfect round corners on our Board Books.
There are so many beautiful handmade papers on display here from all over the world, such as the Black Ink line. I think their booth looks so beautiful with all those large sheets of colorful textured papers draped over tall ladder racks…I want those racks for my living room! But I must say our little booth looks quite artful with our tall Lutradur luminaries and a colorfully painted Lutradur bowl, don’t you think?
We launched a brand new product in our gift line of cards and journals that will be available in June, Calling Cards—Connect with Style. This is a book of tear-out sheets that are pre-perfed into beautifully illustrated calling cards that you can run through your inkjet printer, or stamp and embellish, or do calligraphy by hand. These are perfect for the artist, the crafter, the blogger…anyone who wants to have a card to hand out at social networking occasions.
That’s a wrap for tonight, dear friends of C&T. I am so inspired by this show, I hope you are too. Go out and make some art today!
