C&T Publishing is a group of quilters and crafters dedicated to publishing products tailored to our audience. This blog is where we break away from book schedules and marketing campaigns to focus on what drives us to be creative and how this creativity manifests itself in our every day lives.
Category Archives: Behind the Scenes
Feeling crafty, feeling better
I was feeling down because I had been sick and had not felt good enough to be creative in a few months. I was looking through a bag of papers and other stuff from Quilt Market in May and I came across this wonderful Our Lady of Guadalupe fabric that I had bought. At first I could not figure out what to do with it, I wanted to make something for my Mom, but was stumped. I even considered making (Continue Reading...)
Fabric Painting with Antoinette
Another craft date with my sister, Antoinette. This time we painted fabric using C&T’s line of Liquitex® paints and inks. We did silk color washing, sun printing and then were not sure what to do next.
My sister brought over a linen table cloth that had been contact stained by being stored wet. It was about 6′ x 10′, yellow, with a red border. Antoinette had bought it at a rummage sale in the hopes of giving it a new life. (Continue Reading...)
Collage + Cloth = Quilt
Earlier this year I had a chance to sit in on one of Judi Warren Blaydon’s workshops while I was in the process of editing her new book Collage + Cloth = Quilt. The book (and her workshop) features a unique way for you to use your own photos to create a collage which is then translated into fabric. The book is just luscious to look at, and the process is clearly explained with lots of photos. And there is (Continue Reading...)
Author Interview: Maxine Rosenthal & Joy Pelzmann
We have various books routing through the office continually. It’s the nature of a publishing house. But eventually the books land on my desk to be filed in our library. This way I get to see every book we publish, one by one.
A couple of days ago, One-Block Wonders Encore! finished it’s journey to my in-box. The artistry intrigued me, so I thought I’d find out more about the authors Maxine Rosenthal (below left) and Joy Pelzmann (below right) with (Continue Reading...)
Greening the Office with Ready-to-Go Petal Pots
A while back, I decorated some Ready-to-Go!® Blank Board Decor Petal Pots. While looking around the office for something to put a new spider plant in, I remembered the pots. The outside of the pot is covered with tissue paper adhered with Liquitex® Matte Gel Medium and highlighted with gold Paintstik. The decoration is lace that has been painted with several colors of Liquitex soft body acrylic paint.
With a plastic liner, it’s perfect.
Prairie Dogging
In some offices, when heads start popping up in cubicles it’s called prairie dogging—you know, those cute little critters that are known for poking their little heads up from their burrows to see what’s going on.
At C&T it’s called Show & Tell. A while back, Editor Liz Aneloski was admiring some items she had received from a manufacturer to photograph for an upcoming book, so of course our heads went poking up from our desks to see what she was (Continue Reading...)
Felted Happy Healthy Cells Project
A while back, the quilting community received news that Yvonne Porcella was being treated for ovarian cancer. Many quilters have sent and are continuing to send Yvonne their best wishes. Several local (to C&T) organizations, the Women’s Cancer Resource Center and East Bay Heritage Quilters (EBHQ) got together to make “Happy Healthy Cells” for Yvonne. Most of the cells were made of felt and featured colorful felt and stitched embellishments. Instead of stitching the cells together, these were left unattached (Continue Reading...)
“The Greatest Sewing Machine Ever Built”
Behold! My mother’s Singer Slant-O-Matic 401—the 1958 model. I inherited this dear old machine a few years ago when my mother passed away, and with it, wonderful memories. (Not to mention an assortment of machine attachments that look like tiny instruments of torture—more on that later.)
Mother had it set up in her “sewing closet,” a hall closet that my Dad outfitted for her with shelves and a piece of plywood on top of an old desk. The tabletop fitted the (Continue Reading...)
Quilt Market Wrap Up
Whew, things are finally starting to calm down after a very exciting and eventful Spring International Quilt Market in Minneapolis. We had so much fun sharing our new books and products, and spending time with our industry colleagues. I could go on and on about the adventures, but I figured I would let the pictures tell the story:
The next day, half of the C&T team continued setting up the booth, and the other half conducted our schoolhouse presentations. We had (Continue Reading...)
At Home with Lura and Kerby
One of the many great things about working as an editor at C&T is that I get to work with and get to know a lot of wonderful people such as Lura Schwarz Smith and Kerby Smith. I had met them both at Asilomar when we were all teaching at one session, but I got to know them better while editing their recently released book The Secrets of Digital Quilting—From Camera to Quilt.
Last summer I had a chance to visit (Continue Reading...)
