Quilt Shops

To Temecula!

What does that mean?

It means that today was the day I dropped off my Red/White Challenge Quilt to the Temecula Quilt Company.  The grand opening is October 1st and will run for a month.

My friend Leisa helped me measure them for the tags we placed on them.

I received a very cute thank you gift, shown here with one of Temecula Quilt Company’s patterns (they have a line of their own).  I love the slogan printed on the top of the pattern: What has been done will be done again, there is nothing new under the sun (Ecc. 1).  This is so appropriate for their shop as they use a lot of traditional patterns with reproduction fabrics.

This is a little kit to make a pillow (see above photo) and on the back of the thank-you gift were three magnets from the great Red White quilt show in New York!  I was pretty jazzed about this.

One of the things I love about this shop are the displays.  Everything is so creative and interesting which makes you want to take everything home.  But of course you can’t.

So this is why I bought the pattern.  I may make it in different colors, but their theme resonates with me.

Another clever display.  Most of us have these wooden spools hanging around and here’s what you can do with them: make a mini quilt and wrap them up for display.  The spool will keep the quilt from flopping over, and you’ll have done something interesting with the spools.

Check the  website of the *Temecula Quilt Company* for more.

Blog Strolling · Something to Think About

Inspiration

An example of ikebana, the art of arranging flowers.

Mirei Shigemori and Sofu Teshigahara felt ikebana was so important as an artform they created the New Ikebana Declaration.

“New ikebana rejects nostalgic feelings.
We can’t find a vivid world in anything nostalgic.
There is nothing but calmly sleeping beauty in the nostalgic world.
New ikebana rejects formal fixation. Creation alway brings forth a fresh form.
Fixed form is like a gravestone.”

Shigemori went off to to do his wonderful garden work and Sofu became a number one believer in ikebana as an art form. (from Julia Ritson)

I’ve seen a lot quilt blocks in my life.  Lots.  I have books and books of quilts and I love looking at them and getting ideas. But I often try to find a new way to create in this fabric grid of the quilt world.

Maybe I’m channeling Teshigahara?

 

Textiles & Fabric

Wordy Fabrics

I love word fabrics.  I know they aren’t really a design, but I love text and fonts and writing and blogging and reading, and I teach English.  Need any more qualifications?  Here’s some of my latest fabrics, all washed up and pressed and ready to go.

And I love to travel to interesting places.  This is Sweetwater’s latest word fabric (they seem to do one in every line–I don’t mind) and they’ve arranged the words in blocks, as if this were some sort of word-plaid of some kind, sprinkled with numbers.  A local town is on here: San Bernardino, and Flagstaff is visible right there in the middle.  That’s where my daughter used to live.  They also have Montreal (where we will be traveling to this fall) and Paris and Rome and London–all great cities that I have a memory with.  So maybe that’s why I liked this fabric with words–it triggers lovely memories.  And yes, I’ve even been to Lehi (up there in the upper third, middle, in red).

And I’m getting ready for our little quilt group’s Halloween fabric swap, coming up in a few weeks. I think sometimes we quilters like to touch and play with our fabrics, looking at them, enjoying them.  I happened on a couple of posts yesterday for WIP where the bloggers talked about that very thing.  They liked to get out what they had and arrange them in new color combinations and monkey around with them.  I imagine those of us who buy fabric are like that.

But I’ve also wanted to reach out and touch the jacket of the woman in the pew in front of me in church.  Or when I sit behind some teenage girl with long beautiful hair and she’s fiddling with it during the service, I’m jealous, because my hair is short, and doesn’t lend to fiddling.  I like feeling fuzzy things, soft things, corduroy or the hair of my grandchildren, or my husband’s tweed wool jacket.  I guess I just like texture: both visual (the words) and tactile (fabrics).

A Japanese designer, Yohji Yamamoto, said: ‘Fabric is everything. Often I tell my pattern makers, “Just listen to the material. What is it going to say? Just wait. Probably the material will teach you something.” ‘

Amen.