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!

Continue reading »

I’m taking this ‘guest blogging’ opportunity to introduce myself to the Quilt Blogging World :)
[Thanks ♥ Michele!]

I am Benita Skinner and my husband Brad & I currently live in Tumbler Ridge, which is in remote Northern British Columbia, Canada.

I’m an independent quilt designer and Thanks to the many quilters who enjoy my designs, I make our living by selling my quilt patterns (as pdf files sent via email).
I own, update and maintain several quilting web sites including my main quilt pattern site Victoriana Quilt Designs, Free Quilt Patterns.info and Vintage Embellishments. It’s my husband who makes it all possible for me to work from early morning until night on this adventure.

I don’t have a blog on my site (they weren’t part of the quilting Internet when I began online in 2001] and up to now I haven’t even posted an ‘About Me’ page. And as there is a misperception that Victoriana Quilt Designs is a whole team of people/corporation, I thought it was time!

I began teaching my Victorian House workshop in 1993 when I still lived in Ontario. My original technique was based on my pictorial quilts that I made when I began quilting.

This led me to more workshops using my original quilt designs which I held in my home…my most popular being the Beginner’s Sampler Workshop which I now offer online.

In 2001, with some basic ‘how to’ from my son on using the programs needed to put together a web page (including making the graphics to decorate my site), I began Victoriana Quilt Designs. Through ‘poking’, as he calls it, I taught myself enough about the programs to start offering my quilt designs as pdf patterns. Of course I also knew enough to hire my wonderful tech guy to handle the code for any ‘real’ tech programming.

And in 8 years of monthly updates I have accumulated quite a sizable site. I offer my pattern designs to those who purchase Memberships and now they can also be purchased by non-members.
Plus be sure to check out the Complimentary Patterns and the Library for all the quilting information available, which is a great place for quilt beginners to learn. And of course look for the Sharing section with Quilting Pen Pals & Charm Swaps plus the Used Quilt Books for sale by visitors.

When quilting blogs began to appear I was already very busy with my monthly updates. Since I do not take pretty pictures (I thank my husband for those!!!) which are required to be a good inspiring blog, time made it impossible with how busy we both were already….so I chose not to have one.

This left me out of your great quilt blogging community. I watched from the side lines adding the links to quilt blogs that offered free quilt patterns & tutorials as I found them, onto my other quilt sites: Free Quilt Patterns.info and Quilt Lessons.

I’ve decided to add a ‘Blog Roll’ page to my Feedback & Links section next month. I would love to exchange links with quilty bloggers. Let me know about your blog (via email: benita at victorianaquiltdesigns dot com) and I’ll be happy to add it to my list!

As of 2009, thanks to the nudging of my other son, I also have a Facebook page that allows me to connect with quilters, plus I love sharing my online quilty travels on Twitter.

I hope you enjoy your visit!

Benita Skinner
Victoriana Quilt Designs

Want to be a guest blogger too?

In last month’s anniversary blog post one of the most requested features is guest bloggers. I totally agree. Last February, I did guest blogger month with 58 guests. It was fabulous to learn about such talented quilters from around the world, but way too much work on such a grand scale.

For 2010 I’d like to feature one guest blogger a week. If you’d like to be a guest, first, read other guest blogger posts to get an idea of what others have written about.

I don’t have any specific guidelines and I am pretty much open to whatever you would like to write about. I do ask that it not be too commercial or hard-sell in nature. That’s not to say you can’t mention your business adventures, you certainly can, as part of the overall write-up. (I accept advertising, so if you’d like to write specifically about your product or business, drop me an email to discuss.)

Here are some ideas on what you could write about:

• your own quilting history, how did you get started quilting
• what do you love and/or hate about the process
• tips, techniques, tutorials
• product reviews (not your own product please)
• where you are from, where you’ve been, where you’re going
• what you’ve done, awards won, contests entered, personal achievements (smile on a grandchild’s face!)
• what technique(s) do you want to learn this year, or further perfect
• if you blog, why?
• met anyone famous from the quilting world?
• do you have a mentor or idol, if so, who and why?
• charity efforts, teaching events, retreats, cruises, etc.

Everyone loves to see photos, so I encourage you to include a few with your submission (no more than six please). Please submit photos with a minimum size of 350px wide and a maximum of 500px wide.

Content should be written directly in the email you send to me as plain text, or as an attached text document. Please no MS Word or other publishing program. Do not embed your write up in the email. Have questions, please ask first! Links to your site(s) should be included in the write up, just put them in brackets, and I’ll link them correctly.

Ideally, I’d just like to copy and paste the text and not have to edit it in anyway. I do reserve the right to edit and/or refuse to post anything submitted. If you are in doubt if what you wish to talk about is acceptable or not, just email me first.

If you’d like to participate as a guest blogger, please send me an email about what you’d like to write about and I’ll schedule you a publication date.

Look for this week’s guest blogger post tomorrow morning.

P.S. There’s still time to enter this week’s weekly quilt contest: New Year’s Party Time. Submit your quilt photo for a chance to win the fabulous prize from Pat Sloan

P.P.S Calling all Ontario quilters living in the Greenbelt .. there’s a new challenge from the Ontario Crafts Council. Check out the info posted on the Quilter’s Connection Blog.

Vicki Welsh reporting from the International Quilt Festival in Houston.

I thought I’d wrap up my Houston report with some of the art quilts that I liked. Here they are in no particular order:

Iguana is hand painted and machine quilted.

Corrugated Iron is fused, burned, beaded and machine quilted.

Redwood is made with cut strips attached with free motion quilting.

Stepping Out in Saint John, New Brunswick is machine appliqued, embroidered and quilted.

Edge of the Woods is stitched and painted.

The Awesome Mind is layered fusible web, layered on cotton and then stenciled and stitched.

Check out my blog for even more photos from Houston and to see what I selected as my favorite exhibit.

Vicki Welsh
My Blog: Field Trips in Fiber
My Etsy Shop