Daily Blog - TheQuiltShow.com

Pacific International Quilt Festival

It's time to mark your calendars for the Pacific International Quilt Festival. Two weeks from today PIQF opens its doors out on the West Coast. And, just like last year, if our intrepid reporter spots you wearing your TQS badge, you may find yourself immortalized on the TQS website. To learn more about the PIQF, click here.

The award-winning quilts featured are "Elephant Walk" by Pat Rollie, "Geranium Fairy" by Sherry Glidden, and "Color Me High on Life" by Karlyn Bue Lohrenz. You might recognize a couple of these TQS members.

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Olfa Contest Winners

Congratulations to the three TQS members who each won a Continuous Grid Cutting Mat Set from Olfa. Each set measures up to 35" x 70." You can use either one, two, or three mats simply by joining them together.

The lucky members are Barbara Weitekamp, Joann Hopkins, and Jean Speiser. These three winners will be receiving their mats soon.

Thank you so much to Olfa for giving away three "Grand" prizes. If you'd like to learn more about the system, here's a video from Alex.

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Piecing 101--Safety

Safety is eternal vigilance and not climbing ladders after age 60. Yes Alex can occasionally be seen putting the rotary cutter down still open. Not Good!

Here are all of this week's lessons: The first 2 are less than 3 minutes and the last less than 6.

Prewashing Rotary Cutting & Fractions Safety

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The Quilt Index Receives a Grant to Plan A Global Future

The Quilt Index, an online archive of more than 50,000 documented quilts, plans to begin adding quilts from outside the United States to its robust database. To design a blueprint for creating a truly international digital quilt collection, the Index received a significant planning grant from the Institute for Museum and Library Services (IMLS).

Already, the audience for the Quilt Index is global, but the plan is for its online collections to be global as well, a logical but not simple next step. Users of the Quilt Index range widely, including historians, librarians, curators, quiltmakers, quilt collectors, genealogists and fabric designers, and all will benefit from making the archive international, with an enhanced capability for interchange and cross-cultural collaboration.

The one-year grant of about $100,000 will help the project's organizers solve problems such as "supporting multilingual indexing, searching and retrieval of information," according to the IMLS. In short, the Index wants to build a collaborative virtual museum across dozens of countries and cultures that share a passion for quilting.

The Quilt Index is run in partnership by the Michigan State University Museum, MATRIX Center for Humane Arts, Letters and Social Sciences Online at MSU, and the Alliance for American Quilts. All three partners are dedicated to using new technologies to preserve and share the stories of quilts and quilters online. Jointly, the three partners, along with the International Quilt Study Center and Museum at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln -a new partner for this project-- will use the grant to assess the challenges of going global, and then develop a plan to respond to those challenges. It is expected that this project will provide lessons to other museums and libraries working on international projects.

To learn more about the grant, click here. To learn more about The Quilt Index, click here.

(Quilt made by a member of the Mzansi Zulu Quilt Centre, located just outside of Pietermaritzburg, South Africa. Loaned to the Michigan State University Museum, photograph by Pearl Yee Wong, MSU Museum.)

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Piecing 101- Rotary Cutting and Fear of Fractions

Join Alex in the classroom for more on piecing. Click Here or on the picture to Start.

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Little Flower - FINISHED!

Finished! I love that word.

I finished this small quilt today. It is bound, signed, sleeved, and photographed! Whoo-hoo! I named it Little Flower and it measures only 16" x 19". This was one of those 'just for fun' pieces. It wasn't made for an article, a pattern, a show, or for any other reason than I wanted to make it. There was a time when I had more time to quilt than I knew what to do with. Now, my responsibilities keep me from quilting "for myself" as much as I like. Today was a fun day for me.

Here are answers to a few questions I got on Facebook. It is made from my hand-dyed fabric. It is stitched with 40 polyester threads from Superior (Rainbows and Art Studio). It was quilted on my Bernina 730. None of the quilting was marked in advance. I used wool batting.

Do you fit your quilting time in? - or do you schedule it?

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Piecing 101 --To Prewash or Not to Prewash??

Alex continues her classroom with the age old debate. To Prewash or Not to Prewash???

Disclaimer: (The management of TQS does not take a position on Politics, Religion, Prewashing, or Hip Hop Music. The opinions are that of the speaker.)

Click on the picture to go to the lesson.

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Custom Ironing Board

A good and stable ironing surface is a must for quilters of every sort. But, the cost of custom made boards can make a girl think twice. So why not build one yourself? Actually, making your own custom board is a piece of cake when you get right down to it. With a few tools and the help of your local hardware person you can have a nice, hard, pressing surface that will give you years of service.

Materials:

3/4" pressed wood or plywood,
100% Cotton batting
Muslin or other light cotton fabric
staple gun
scissors

1. Determine the size board you would like. The board featured measures 36" x 29" and fits nicely on a tabletop.
2. Go to your local hardware store and ask to have your board cut to size. You will probably have enough wood left over to make another ironing board for a friend.
3. Cut two layers of batting large enough to fold around to the underside of the board on all four sides. Center the two batting layers on the board; folding to the back and tacking in place with a few staples.
4. Cut the muslin fabric large enough to fold around to the underside of the board on all four sides. Center the muslin over the batting. Fold muslin to the underside and tack in place on one side. On the opposite side pull muslin taught and tack in place along the underside(wait to tack corner later).
5. Repeat with other two sides.
6. Pull in corners and tack in place. Cut any excess fabric and batting away.
You now have your own custom ironing board ready to go. As the top gets stained just add another layer of muslin.

If you have a great tip to share send it to us here.

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Tour the Van Briggle Pottery

Recently TQS had the opportunity to visit the original showroom and working pottery of Artus and Anne Van Briggle in Colorado Springs, Colorado. The 1908 Dutch lowland farmhouse building was designed as a spectacular medium for displaying decorative tiles and other fired elements to their best advantage. Visitors were exposed to a whole host of ideas on how to incorporate tile and decorative pottery in their own homes.

And why are we showcasing tile on a quilting website, you might be asking yourself? We fell in love with the design elements, and thought they would translate very well to quilting. Join us for a tour of one of America's oldest active art potteries. We think you will find the visit well worth it.

To learn more about Artus and Anne Van Briggle click here.

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3 BIG Winners of Olfa's Connecting Mats--Entries Close at 12am Monday PST

Alex loves her Olfa Mat set up.

Now 3 Lucky Winners will have these mats added to their sewing rooms. It's Easy. Just email to Olfa@thequiltshow.com (copy and paste into your address bar if it's not automatic) and put "Connecting Mats" in the subject line. One entry per person. The Contest ends Monday night midnight Pacific Time.

Thank you Olfa!

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