My granddaughter Ava woke up Christmas morning to a wonderful surprise! She got a beautiful pink quilt of her very own. I wish I could take all the credit for making it, but no. Ruthmary, one of our account reps, is the creator of this lovely quilt, and I just did some sewing on the binding. Have a nice nap, my little Angel! Maybe one day Grandma Shirley will make you a quilt.
It’s happened again. I have a song stuck in my head.
When I’m quilting, I love to listen to music. But I must admit I get in quite a rut. I listen to the same CD over and over, most likely because I’m not really listening to it at all. I just hum along and use the music to keep my groove when I’m ironing, cutting, or sewing. But that means I end up humming the songs at odd times after I’ve left my studio, not knowing where the tune came from.
Right now the song stuck in my head is fabulously appropriate for work (or for play…). I just screened Peggy Martin’s DVD (Peggy Martin Teaches you Quick Strip Paper Piecing) that was just released this November and there’s a terrific song that runs over the closing credits. A little research told me it’s “Quilting Party” performed by none-other-than Peggy Martin herself. It’s beautiful! What a talented woman.
I get songs out of my head by thinking the tune of “The Girl from Ipanema”…that gets rid of any unwanted tune and doesn’t get stuck itself. I’m usually pretty desperate to get the songs unstuck, but not this time. I think I’ll let this one stick around for awhile.
Errata. I hate errata.
An errata is an error found in a book after publishing. And we have them. (Not with any frequency, thank goodness!) If any publisher says they never have mistakes in their books, either they’re not telling the truth or they don’t care to check.
When I started at C&T six years ago, I was a technical editor. I love the math, crunching numbers, calculating yardage. There are thousands of numbers to crunch in some project books! The key to being a good technical editor is to also try to predict how someone else might read an instruction, cut a strip of fabric, adjust the yardage requirements and edit or word the material accordingly.
We’re so serious about technical accuracy that we have two technical editors reviewing every project. But unfortunately once in a while (once in a great while), we miss the mark.
This is quite painful for us, but more painful for someone who’s trying to make a project. We often receive calls or emails from readers, mid-project, with questions about construction or cutting. The calls and emails go to our technical editors who work to figure out what’s going on. Usually it’s not a problem in the book and we are delighted to help the reader out with the answer. But sometimes we’ve missed something.
So we list our errata on our website. (Look at the bottom of the home page for Book Corrections.)
We don’t hide them. We don’t use a euphemism (such as “Book Additions”) that would make them harder for our readers to find. And we don’t take them down when a book is reprinted. Of course we fix any errors and clarify any confusing areas as soon as possible. But, unlike other publishers, we don’t take down the correction. That wouldn’t be fair to the thousands of people who purchased the original printing!
I hate errata. The best errata is one that never happens. The second best errata is one that we do absolutely everything we can to make right. We love our readers—we are our readers, quite literally—and we are committed to their success.
Fantastique Ornament
While decorating the tree at C&T, we thought it should be a reflection of us, so it seemed natural to make ornaments using Fantastiques. I love these little guys! It’s a 6″ x 8″ book with mix and match characters that you just pop out. There are pages of heads, arms, and legs as well as images to use for torsos. You can use other things for the torsos though, like these playing cards! They’re fun to embellish too—what better excuse for glitter and feathers?
“We need 20 handmade thank-you cards to send to a group of sales reps for one of our distributors please” was management’s request. Now that’s the kind of assignment we love to take on—and it showcases one of our favorite papercrafting products - Fantastiques!
Robot's Best Friend
Popcorn For Two
Trice Boerens designed these beautiful watercolor illustrations of whimsical characters and creatures. You just pop out their heads and limbs from the book, and attach them to one of the photographic torsos from the back pages, or create your own torsos with found objects…or try needlefelting one, like I did for the little doggie shown here (here’s a great book on needlefelting dogs, by the way)
With Fantastiques, your greeting cards practically design themselves…the characters’ expressive faces do all the work—it’s really fun to imagine what they might be thinking and then match it to the sentiment of your card. In order to make 20 cards quickly, we created a simple background design using velvet paper, inked edges and ribbons for a textural contrast. Then comes the popping-out party! Mixing and matching body parts with cute little brads was such a kick! We adhered them to the background with just a few raised glue dots, so the arms and legs can move around.
So our heartfelt thanks was written inside each card, and they have been sent to a group of new reps who will be working very hard to sell our books and products. You can see all 20 cards in the Fantastiques Flickr group…I’m totally addicted to these little guys….once you get some for yourself, you’ll know what I mean! :-)
I love going to Quilt Market twice a year and I can’t believe that this was my 12th market! I am always delighted by the wonderful fabrics, creative new pattern designers and cool new notions that I see each season. While I was there, M’Liss and Michael Hawley took some pictures in the booth and gave me the Flickr address to view them, so I am including that link to give you an inside glimpse of the show from one of our favorite author’s perspective.
At the show, I am lucky enough to walk the floor and this time I found something that knocked my socks off. And I wasn’t the only one. I stumbled upon a bead vendor, The Bead Goes On that was the talk of our authors and staff in the booth. Paula Nadelstern went wild over the beads; I had to tell Katie. This bead company had some of the most interesting beads I’ve ever seen. So, I did what any sensible shopper would do, I told my friends and we went and shopped on the last day of the show. Janet, Lynn and I found some beautiful beads, it was really hard to choose, but we all came away happy. My favorite beads were the tiny seed beads that were wrapped around a hollow core and were either ovals, squares or circles. So far I have made a Lariat for my sister, a necklace for my mom using the circle beads (see picture) and a necklace for my niece. I still have a few beads left and now I think I have been bitten by the beading bug. I can’t wait for spring market to see what new treasures I will discover.
Did you know that the maker behind our yummy Quilter’s Chocolates is actually Ghirardelli? Yes, it’s true. The famous chocolatier right from our own Bay Area backyard is the secret behind all the flavor in each little tin.
To sweeten things further, I just read in a recent issue of Something Extra, my local Raley’s grocery store magazine, that Ghirardelli is a manufacturer with high integrity. To quote Alyssa Lulie, the magazine’s Managing Editor,
Ghirardelli is highly involved in the World Cocoa Foundation, a grassroots organization that works with small cocoa farmers to help them learn better farming techniques, how to get a better price for their goods, and bring education and healthcare opportunities to their villages.”
It feels good to develop and offer our customers products with decent and humane values behind them. Makes the chocolate taste that much sweeter.
At our recent lunchtime celebration honoring Kris Yenche, Carolyn Aune, and Lynn Koolish, our CEO Todd Hensley pointed out, “We’ve had a total of five C&T staff members celebrate 10-year anniversaries this year…”
So why do they stay? What keeps them motivated and coming back for more?
Ever wonder about the glamorous goings-on at a film shoot? Check out these photos from the filming of the DVD Laura Wasilowski Teaches You to Create Fused Art Quilts: At Home with the Experts #10.
Laura Wasilowski teaches you to create Fused Art Quilts—Take 1!
Setting up the Fused Art Quilt Shoot
Are we having fun yet?
Every once in a while, I find myself in a conversation that starts with, “Then there was the time…”. I actually hate these types of discussions because it usually means revealing an error or misfortune in the pursuit of something otherwise destined to be fabulous.
So is the case of our recent Quilter’s Chocolate product developed here at C&T. This was an idea offered by non-other than our very own Payroll Manager, Steve Berryman, and what an idea it was too. Chocolate for quilters! Brilliant.
I set out to find a supplier that would meet our high standards for this beloved confection and found him after a chance encounter with a former colleague of mine, Lynn Sauter. Lynn and and I worked together a few years back at Savoir-Faire. Not so surprisingly, Lynn is still in the sales arena but this time instead of art supplies, I discovered she was rep-ing a line of fine chocolates in little travel tins. It seemed like fate had brought me back together with an old friend so I could create a wonderful new product line.
After the appropriate development phases, which of course involved a good deal of chocolate taste testing, we decided two traditional flavors would be the way to go—milk and dark. It being C&T’s 25th Anniversary year, we decided this would be the perfect occasion to kick off the line and picked two beautiful quilt images for the tin lids. Linda Jenkins of Piece O’Cake Design’s garden-fresh Aunt Millie’s Garden quilt (from the book of the same name) would be used on the milk chocolate tin and Margaret J. Miller’s lovely City Lights quilt (from “Stunning Angle Play Quilts“) would appear on the dark chocolate tin. Artwork was sent to the supplier and we eagerly awaited our first look and taste of the new product line.
The first of the chocolates arrived the day of our big warehouse sale. They looked and tasted great. The tins were stunning and the little cardboard point-of-purchase boxes were everything we hoped for. Yay! Success.
A few weeks and hundreds of tins of chocolates later, the most unexpected call came in from a quilt shop. “Do you realize the name of the quilter on the bottom of both tins is the same?”
WHAT??? Oh, no. Please don’t tell me this has happened to our lovely little chocolate product. Sure enough, it turns out the supplier mixed up our artwork and misprinted the bottom of the milk chocolate tin crediting both designs to Margaret J. Miller.
The print is exceptionally small, so it’s very likely that most folks won’t notice the problem. No one here realized it either until the caller pointed it out. The art we sent was correct, who could suspect that there could be an error like this made? “Not good,” as my 4-year old daughter frequently says when something goes wrong. It’s never fun to find an error on a product, and this one was no exception. We’ve notified Linda Jenkins that we’ll fix it on the re-print and, regrettably, I’ll have another story that I can tell by starting off with a sad shake of my head and the words, “Then there was the time…”
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