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: Inspiration
A yarn about crewel
Once upon a time, a woman named Frances Nichols Hoagland held a great passion for crewel. She loved her wool yarns and the colors, the textures, and the potential they held for each and every project.
With the joy of making, came the joy of giving. Along her crewel path, she made an owl pillow for her son and daughter-in-law, a clown bag and a dollhouse rug for one granddaughter, and an elephant pillow (now moth-eaten) for another granddaughter, all of (Continue Reading...)
Lone Star Legacy with Helen Frost & Blanche Young
I just wanted to tell you how delighted Blanche and I were that International Quilt Market and Festival hosted a special exhibit, “Lone Star Legacy,” featuring 20 of our Lone Star quilts!
Most of the quilts are from our current book, All-Star Quilts. Two of the quilts were blasts from the past—one was made by Blanche in the 1980s, and another was from the cover of our very first book published in 1979, The Lone Star Quilt Handbook.
The rest (Continue Reading...)
Hey, I finished 2 quilting projects!
Maybe you read my previous post about my PhDs (Projects half Done). Well, I’m here to say that I finished something!
A few of the folks at C&T have been making table runners from the book French Braid Quilts by Jane Hardy Miller. They inspired me to give it a try. Above is the one I’m giving to my mom for Christmas. (Mom—don’t look!) All the fabrics but one are from different C&T give-aways over the past year or (Continue Reading...)
My studio garden
Today I’ll be a guest on the Creative Mojo radio show at 12:00 pm PT (3:00 pm ET) – I hope you’ll tune in and join us in the live chat room! Click here at showtime.
So on to a little story about my studio, which sits at the back of my yard. In another life it was a garage, with an upstairs that was once an apartment. In a 10 year stint of constipated gardening (this is my first house, (Continue Reading...)
French Braid Trifecta
We recently interviewed our author, Jane Hardy Miller, to learn more about the story behind her fabulous French Braid quilts that have been featured in her three bestselling books—French Braid Quilts (with Arlene Netten), French Braid Obsession, and French Braid Transformation.
How did French Braids come to be your specialty, and what is it that you love about them the most?
I sort of started with the French Braids by accident. I had been quilting for over 30 years and I just (Continue Reading...)
Historical fabric from Andover
It has been about a month since Fall Quilt Market and I am still getting caught up…but I wanted to share with you this historical fabric line that Andover introduced at Market called Winterthur, inspired by textiles that John Hewson originally created in the late 1760’s which are featured in the Winterthur Museum.
Hewson created Baltimore-type designs; he printed cover lids (bed spreads), handkerchiefs, and other fine linens. He was referred to as a Bromley Hall fabric printer, which meant (Continue Reading...)
Am I qualified to quilt?
Looking around my house recently, I realized that I’m definitely “qualified” to work as an editor for C&T Publishing. You probably didn’t know it, but I have several PhDs. (Uh, huh.) Just browse through this post and you’ll see some of them . . . Projects half Done.
Above is the oldest of my UFOs (UnFinished Objects)…a cross-stitch alphabet sampler I started when my first daughter was a baby. She’s 23 now and the project has a permanent shrine (Continue Reading...)
The story of the stamp
The saga of my signature stamp quilt patterns started with a guild challenge in September 2005. We were all given a fat-eighth of bright, patterned fabric that looked very much like the Rubik’s Cube toy…you can see it in the center of the quilt.
Since I am a representational artist, I tend to gravitate to realistic imagery…so what did that fabric look like to me other than a puzzle cube? Maybe a telephone keypad or a graph or a structure? I (Continue Reading...)
Thanks for the inspiration, #14
I had considered taking a beading class for quite some time. I have tons of jewelry and thought making some of my own would be a great solution for all those random pieces in my jewelry box that don’t quite work with anything else. So when our publisher, Amy Marson, thumped her impressive beading case down on my desk and said I could use anything I wanted, I pulled the trigger and signed up for a beginning stringing class at Just (Continue Reading...)
Evolution of a quilt
In 2006, my sister Paula (who lives in Colorado and knows what a Francophile I am) made a beautiful over-sized lap quilt for me. Well, she made the top. I have a Nolting longarm machine, so she makes finished quilts for everyone else in the family, but she send me TOPS which I then have to finish myself! I’m NOT complaining though. Paula had used a variety of star patterns, in sizes that were multiples of 3″ and (Continue Reading...)
