By: Tammy Gilley

Quilts were meant for sharing.

I’ve been noodling about quilts. Women who make them. Women who need them. Quilts, especially those that are handcrafted, are really just a giant hug for anyone who wraps one around herself.

Perhaps by stitching quilts, we’re comforting ourselves, too, because the whole concept of what has happened in Haiti is overwhelming. And sending a check helped me for a day or so. Then I grew antsy. So, I stitched. And I thought.

I’d like to do a "quilt drive", for lack of a better term, and get quilts to the women, children, men (we don’t discriminate here) in Haiti. I realize the needs in Haiti are huge, and "sending blankets" may not seem like the answer. But consider this. Quilts offer comfort, solace, warmth. These beautiful people lost everything. Perhaps by sending our quilts, we are also sending our love.

I’ve been talking to my friend, Rebecca Sower. I know many of you follow her blog. Rebecca returned home from Haiti only days before the earthquake hit. I checked her blog everyday to see if there was word about the people she met, what was happening, how I could help.

When I presented the idea of sending handcrafted quilts to Haiti, she said, "I absolutely love the quilt idea! Truly, one thing they need right now is warmth and comfort."

So. Without further ado…let’s Quilt Haiti.

Rebecca is planning a trip back to Haiti later this year. She has generously offered to get our quilts to Haiti. So, let’s send her a whole big bunch of them! If you’re a quilter and like me, you have oodles of quilts in your home. Send me one of those. Or create a new one to send. Send a handmade bunny or bear. Send a baby quilt. Send a king size quilt. It’s up to you. Whatever you send will be absolutely perfect.

If you’d like to be involved, simply leave a comment on my blog. Please be sure to include your email address, so I can contact you with the details.

I am so excited about this! And I hope you are, too. There are blog buttons available on my blog (thanks to my pal Monica Solorio-Snow for giving of her creative and technical talents). Don’t be shy, spread the word. What the world needs now, is quilts, love, and more quilts. And more love.

Send quilts. Send love. Pass it on.

Hi, I’m Barbara Wilson from the Thimble Pleasures (Chapel Hill, NC) blog "Hot Flashes". It’s great to be a Guest Blogger! Our shop’s blog gets lots of comments on anything to do with quilt studio design and organization. So, I thought I would share some of our ideas with you!

After years of quilting on the kitchen table and having to clean up every night, I had studio envy! So, I took the plunge and decided to convert a bedroom into a quilting studio. It’s not a large space and I quickly realized that I needed a plan to be certain I could do all my quilting in one room and stay within my budget. I read books about studio organization and visited friends’ studios to learn more.

This was my initial wish list for my studio:

• A design wall
• A sewing table with extension table to support my quilts
• A cutting table
• Project and fabric storage

Design Wall: The design wall was a challenge. I didn’t want to damage the walls by gluing foam insulation board to the wall, so I hung quilt batting from quilt clips – and Voila! A great design wall! I glued the batting to a small piece of wood and attached it to the wall with quilt clips. When I need the room to look really nice for guests, I just take the batting down and put a quilt in its place!

Sewing Table: The sewing table was the most costly piece of the studio. I looked and looked for the style and color I wanted and finally found one that met my needs. The extension behind the sewing machine folds down when I need to close the table (which I have NEVER done, by the way). The drawer to the left of the machine area also has a table insert that provides lots of support to my quilts as they grow in size. The machine is mounted on a spring-adjusted platform, so the table can be closed without moving the sewing machine – haven’t ever done that, either!

Cutting Table: The room is not very big and I needed something tall enough to cut fabric comfortably, but not so big that it took up a lot of space. I used an inexpensive Ikea student desk with an adjustable height desk top! It also has adjustable book shelves for storage – love it! I added a task light to brighten the cutting area and a template holder, so that all my cutting tools were in one place. No more running up and downstairs to the kitchen counter top to cut fabric or trim blocks.

Storage: I put my unfinished projects in individual scrap booking boxes and stack them on the floor under the cutting table. They are neatly put away, but visible to remind me how many I actually have! Fabric storage – the last frontier! There are two closets in my studio, one with shelves top to bottom. Most of my fabric is stored in that closet, organized by project or fabric type, not color! There is a batik shelf, children’s fabric shelf, holiday (Christmas, Fall, and Halloween), and the "the rest", comprised of various fabric collections for quilts I have planned. My scraps are organized in Scrap Therapy boxes by shape (5, 3.5, and 2 inch squares and 2.5 inch strips) and light/darks.

My storage is still a work in progress, but here are some additional storage suggestions:

• Use see through containers like plastic jars and bins, glass canisters, and wire baskets to keep everything from beads to fabric contained, yet in plain sight for inspiration and easy access.
• Label your containers. You can invest in a label maker or use stick-on labels. If you use a cabinet with drawers, paint the drawer fronts in blackboard paint and write your labels in chalk!
• Re-purpose bookshelves or buy new. Try to use units with adjustable shelves so you can change the heights to suit your needs (and containers) over time.
• Color coordinate? Most quilters find it easiest to locate the right fabrics, threads, dyes, and embellishments when they sort and store these supplies by color. Plus, organizing anything by color makes it look more orderly. I’m not there yet, but my friend Sharyn is!

• Re-purpose. Organize your supplies in household items meant for another purpose. Put marking pens in colorful mugs, paint bottles in spice racks, or buttons in tiered candy dishes. I use a fabric shoe holder that hangs in my closet to store UFOs. I also use freezer zip lock bags to store projects, quilt pieces, appliqué motifs. I like baskets for storage, there are so many pretty ones to chose from these days!
• I made a "quilt tackle box" to hold all my quilting tools and essentials for quilt class. I keep thread, needles, pencils, glue sticks, pins, measuring tape etc. in the tackle box. Now everything is in one place and I just grab it and go!

• Clean up. If you pick up your studio between projects, it will be easier to find things. (Yes, I know…..) At the end of a project, I cut my scrap fabric into the Scrap Therapy sized pieces and store in boxes (above), this saves space and time! It pays off later when you are making a scrap quilt.

I recently added a laptop computer and ink jet printer for making quilt labels to my studio. I also keep my digital camera in the studio, so I can take photos of all my projects. Wireless Internet allows me to take online quilt classes, write the blog, and post my quilts on Facebook for my friends to see from my studio!

So, if you have studio envy, I encourage each of you to take the plunge and create your own studio! You deserve it! It doesn’t have to be fancy, or big, it just needs to be YOURS!

Happy quilting!
Barbara Wilson
www.Thimblepleasures.com
Chapel Hill, North Carolina

Hi – I am Mary Anne Ciccotelli and I live in Pelham New York (20 miles north of New York City). I was born and raised in a small Idaho farming community. I became a "true" quilter in 2000. At that time when people would ask me how long I had been quilting I would get really nervous and not know exactly how to answer this question. Then I realized that I could not remember when I started quilting because I cannot remember when quilting had not been a part of my life. In fact, this past summer we celebrate my 50 1/2 Birthday by hanging a lot of my quilts and while preparing for this big event I discovered that I had made at least one quilt in each of the decades of my life.

I am privileged to have six generations of quilts in my home. I love sharing my quilting legacy story. Check here for a brochure. [PDF file]

Here is a little about the quilters in my quilting legacy:

1st Generation – My Grandma

The oldest quilt or piece of a quilt I have is this framed piece of a Double Wedding Ring quilt made by my great-grandmother for my mother as a wedding gift. My mother was storing her quilt on the top shelf of her closet. The closet had a ceiling light and the quilt got pushed up against the bulb and started to burn and turned into a swiss cheese double wedding quilt. When my niece was a teenager, she took what was left of this quilt and had pieces of it framed for each of my family members. I am kind of glad that this happened, because I am the youngest of three girls and I would have never been in line to inherit this quilt.

2nd Generation – My Grandma

Each granddaughter had a quilt in her trousseau made by my Grandma. This is the quilt that she made for me. What I really remember about my Grandma is the stale cookies that she always had in her cookie jar. I am so thankful that I have this quilt as a tangible memory of her and her workmanship.

3rd Generation – My Mother

My mother taught me to sew at a young age. I remember spending many afternoons playing under the quilting frames while she and neighborhood women quilted the hours away. Following the example of her grandmother and mother, my mother has made a quilt (or quilt top) for each of her granddaughters for their wedding. Later in her life she used all the double knit polyester to make nine-patch block quilts. She loved to make a tied flannel baby quilt for family members or friends’ new baby.

4th Generation – Me

My sister and I decided that it would be really neat to make a special quilt for my parents’ 50th wedding anniversary. We sent each of the family members a plain piece of fabric with instructions to decorate it however they wanted. The completed blocks were sent back to me. I then pieced all the blocks together. At the time, I was a single parent and working full time. There was no way I was going to have the time to hand-quilt it. So I purchased a book about machine quilting and a whole new realm of possibilities began to open up to me. This is the first quilt that I machine quilted.

Since that first machine quilted quilt in 1992 I have practiced and practiced to improve my machine quilting skills. In 2000 after discovering that you can do more than blocks and sashing and have never looked back. I love using all different kinds of embellishment to give the quilt the finishing touches that it needs. I also love to make folded hexagons. I am always looking for innovative projects to use folded hexagons on. Visit my website to see many of these projects that I have designed.

I also offer a tutorial on The Needle and Thread Approach to the Folded Hexagon [PDF file].

5th Generation – My Daughters

My oldest daughter Emily made her first quilt when she was around 13 years old. Of course when she said she wanted to make a quilt we went to the sewing room and cut up a bunch of scraps and she made nine-patch blocks because that is what Grandma did. Not to be outdone by her older sister, Jennie made her first quilt at the age of 10.

6th Generation – My Granddaughter

My five year old granddaughter made me a quilt for my 50th birthday present. The quilt is called "Tricky Square". She named it this because each square has a match except for two of the squares. Can you find the tricky squares?

The Generations Unite

Last April I completed a quilt titled The Generations Unite.

The inspiration for this project was the embroidered blocks that I found in my mom’s hope chest after her death in 2000. What a wonderful opportunity is was for me to bring the work of four generations together in this quilt. The label on the quilt states; “This quilt was made by the hands and feet of four generations. Not wanting to leave the other two generations out, I included design elements that represent all six generations of quilters in my family. I had the opportunity of seeing this quilt hang in the IQA show in Houston this past Fall. You can see a video, Show Us Your Quilt, produced by Bonnie McCaffery that includes a segment of me (starting at 5:20) with this quilt in Houston. You can read more about this project here.

I am so thankful to be a member of a church that teaches the importance of family and recording family history. I am also thankful that my ancestors followed these guidelines and took the time to write parts of their life story. I appreciate the family history work that my mother did. It is because of her hard work in collecting and organizing this information that I have the stories about family quilters to make these quilts even more special.

Each of us has a quilting legacy, it may be six generations like mine, maybe you are lucky enough to have seven generations already or maybe you are the first generation. It doesn’t matter. What I hope is that you record the stories that go along with the quilts and the quilter that are a part of your quilting legacy.

I would love to hear about your quilting legacy.

Thanks!
Mary Anne

I’ve been quilting since 2003, when my Aunt-in-law, Karen took me to her Guild Potluck, I was so inspired and in aaaw that I signed up for every class and bought hundreds of dollars worth of the “must-haves”. I was married in 2001, and I thought once I got married, my DH would entertain me…I was in for a surprise :) So, I went and took a sewing class with an old Kenmore passed onto me from my Aunt. I LOVED it and then I took 2 or 3 more classes. It ended up that my sewing teacher was part of this aaaaw inspiring guild and I’ve been a member ever since.

I love to try new techniques and most of the harder ones like paper piecing, cotton theory, free motion quilting (which I still need to practice), I’ve learnt from books and magazines on my own late at night lol. I have, however, taken many classes and probably always will. I’ve taught a few classes and will be teaching more as I love to inspire and share quilting to all ages and levels of experience.

I’m originally from Jasper (area), Alberta, Canada (where my grandparents owned this resort). I grew up in the mountains and, as a kid, I definitely took it for granted but now as an adult I LOVE the mountains especially in the Winter and my roots. Some of my Aunts are sewers, stitchers (mostly) and my Mum has sewn since she was 10. So, I must I have the gene. I’ve always liked to be creative either by decorating something or knitting and now sewing and quilting.

I started blogging in 2007 but seriously blogging in 2009. Val’s Quilting is a true collection of my thoughts, quilting projects, UFO’s (don’t we all have a list), tutorials (some mine and some I’ve collected), friendships and more. I blog about Quilting in Alberta which is based around the two guilds I belong to and local events. I truly like this blogging world because you get to connect with like-minded people all over the world and they with you. I’m not sure I will ever go to Belgium never-mind if I did, have the time to find a quilter & become good friends with her while I’m there – blogging it’s fabulous! I’m very active on Facebook (personally and for my business fan page) and Twitter .

A tool I can’t live without is my Gingher Scissors and this is all thanks to Kim who introduced me to them years ago. These are by far the best scissors I’ve ever owned, they feel nice in the hand, they look great and the best thing about them is they stay sharp!

For 2010 I would like to finish my UFO’s, more e-interviews (if you want to be interviewed email me), more vid-casts and maybe start a podcast (I’ve had a few requests), spend more time with friends, design more, learn new techniques, save more memories by taking photos of everything, plan a few retreats (to come). I want to go to Houston this year maybe once if not twice (anyone want to join me?) and soak it all in.

I’ve always wanted to own a quilting store but the one I wanted to own wasn’t for sale sooo…this past fall I took the plunge and opened an online boutique style of shop, Pastimes Online Ltd. where I specialize in higher end quilting notions, projects, dupioni silks, block of the months , neat items like Quilters Tea (yum) etc.

Thank you for reading my entry as a Guest Blogger, now its your turn!! Thanks Michele for making this site so fantastic!

(All pictures taken by me, I love any type of flower and my cat, Tig)

Want to be a guest blogger too?

It is with excitement I sit here in my sunny design studio writing my first post for Quilting gallery. Let me introduce myself. I’m Lenna Green designer of Little Green Cottage patterns and founder of Stitching Cow.com

Sewing and quilt making have been an important part of my life for as long as I can remember.
As a child I was always making things and was often found at the side of my talented Grandmother learning craft related skills. We lived just around the corner so I regularly found my way to her house where she was always busy with a new project.

After school I graduated with a degree in education majoring in design and technology and taught in high schools for a few years before marrying and beginning a family. It was during this time that my interest inquilt making took hold and I was approached to teach quilting and hand embroidery classes at the local Patchwork and Quilting shop. My youngest daughter was only 3 months old at the time and I can remember teaching in between breast feeds which was a bit of a juggle.

Before long I was prompted to start designing my own projects and since we lived in a one hundred year old cottage with a green roof, I settled on the name Little Green Cottage as a brand name.

Six years lapsed in a blink of an eye and it was at this time that hubby and I decided to have a sea change and move from inland NSW Australia to Tasmania, an island off the South coast of Australia that captured our hearts many years ago. This lifestyle change prompted me to start my own online business and Stitching Cow was conceived. Since working on my designing and business full time I have enjoyed being published in many leading craft magazines including, Homespun, Creating Country Crafts, Patchwork and Stitching, Australian Patchwork and Quilting and just recently Sew It All, a new sewing magazine just released in the United States. You can see samples of these publications here.

I am thrilled that my business has opened up many doors and has allowed me to teach and help other sewing enthusiasts on a much bigger scale. And it is with this aim that I look forward to being a regular contributor here along side Michele at Quilting Gallery. I hope to share with you some of my best quilt making, quilting and hand embroidery tips.

With this in mind I would love to hear from you. Please feel free to write in and ask questions that you would like me to answer. Maybe you have a project that you need some advice about, or perhaps you would like to try your hand at a new sewing related craft but are not sure where to start.

Whatever your sewing related question or concern feel free to leave a comment here and I will endeavor to post about each of your questions in my forth coming posts.

Let the fun begin!
Warmly Lenna

I am so thrilled to have Lenna join me here at the Quilting Gallery. In last month’s anniversary blog post, one of the most requested additions for the site is new tutorials, tips and tricks, learning new techniques, etc.

There were comments about stitchery, embroidery and redwork, all of which I love, but have no experience with. Lenna is an expert in these techniques and I’m super excited she’s willing to share her vast knowledge here.

Welcome Lenna!! I look forward to learning from you.

My name is Darla and I am one of the new bloggers out there. I am a beginner quilter with a lot of quilting and blogging ambitions, and a unique perspective.

Rather than spending a lot of time talking about my blog Scientific Quilter, I wanted to share a (long) story of my experiences of the past year that lead me to be a quilting blogger.

I started quilting when I received a free sewing machine from work in February of 2009 and somehow in my head I had thought you had to have a sewing machine to be a quilter. I’ve wanted to be a quilter for several years, but kept putting off that idea because I kept putting off the idea of buying all the supplies.

A year earlier I had purchased a book on quilting – Your First Quilt Book by Carol Doak and it sat in my car for most of that year while the quilting idea kept bubbling up. Once I got the sewing machine, the book was opened and read cover to cover.

I used the book and some tutorials I found on the internet to get through the blocks of my first quilt, trying out different colors at the store. I also checked out several books from the library and started reading them cover to cover, starting to figure out what it was about the quilts that I liked. I found the local quilt store and started looking in wonder at all the beautiful designs. I created a second quilt made only of squares, but like many projects set it aside for a while and signed up for a machine quilting class at the quilt shop.

In April or May, I started thinking about using my iPod for more than music from my own CDs and I opened up iTunes, typed in the word quilting into the music store and here were all these quilting podcasts. I had a lot of questions about what I was seeing at first. What was a quilting podcast? How did I download it? Were they free?

I clicked on Alex Anderson’s Quilt Connection and hit the play button on the first episode. Someone was going to talk about their love of quilting for a period of time. Amazing. I was hooked immediately. I hit subscribe on the podcast and found the podcast section on my iTunes (on the left side) and started downloading episodes. And they were free! I loaded them onto my iPod the same way I did for my music and went out and cleaned my car listening to the podcast with headphones. While I was doing other things, I was learning about quilting!

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