Earlier this year, Kim Wulfert from Women on Quilts asked for submissions of creative stories by creative women.

The Women’s Historical Fiction Challenge E-Book is complete and available for download.

It includes 16 fictional stories written by 14 women about women who create and live at a tough time in history. Complete with period photos and quilts, plus personal thoughts from the writers and judges about their stories.

Kim’s done an amazing job putting this together. I can only imagine how much work it was. I’ve had the pleasure to read some of the stories already, and they are wonderful.

Visit Kim’s sites:

• Women on Quilts
• Quilters Spirit
• New Pathways Into Quilt History
• Quick Guides to Dating Quilts

Deb from Stitchin’ Heaven and Jerry from Quilter’s Quarters dropped by the Quilt Shop Locator booth at Spring Market.

They told me about the $10,000 Dream Sewing Room Makeover contest they are sponsoring (along with Everything Quilts and Pine Needles).

Here’s a photo of Deb and I checking out the contest web site. I entered the contest and won a free quilting book. I’ll let you know what book I won when it arrives from Texas. (It’s a mystery!)

UPDATE: The contest is now closed and links to it have been removed from this post.

What a truly wonderful story this is, The centenarian quilter. Emily Harrell has been quilting since she was 8, and she’s now 100. I’m sure we could all learn a few tricks from her.

Found via Twitter by @konabayfabrics.

As a fundraiser for The Quilters Hall of Fame July 2009 induction ceremonies of Merikay Waldvogel, Kim Wulfert from Women On Quilts is sponsoring an invitation to women to write a creative story about growing up as a female, between 1902 and 1942 in the US.

In 750-1000 words, your story will have as the central theme a female, any age or ethnicity, living alone or in a family that is just making enough money to just get by each month, or less, BUT she doesn’t see it this way. She is surrounded by neighbors and a circle of friends who are also living the same way, poor. This is pre-television time and radios and electricity were not available everywhere. Word of mouth was the news in neighborhoods over much of our country then.

More info:

• Call for Fictional Stories as Fundraiser for TQHF & Salute to Women’s History Month
• Submission guidelines and other info

Image by Judy Anne Breneman

On Twitter this morning, quiltinghistory, aka Judy Breneman, posted this link, The Story of Those Dump Quilts.

What an amazing find. It makes me very happy to hear that these quilts were rescued and have found a loving home. Just look at the amazing workmanship, almost gone forever.

Imagine the stories they could tell… Penny wrote a wonderful piece, If Quilts Could Talk.

Off to the sewing room to continue work on my own masterpieces … haha!

No doubt, many of us quilters all have this same problem… What to do with our fabric stash?

Here are some articles I’ve found on the subject.

• Organizing your Stash into books
• Fabric Folding
• Scrap User’s System!
• Fabric Stash Organization and Tutorial
• Fabric Justice
• Fabric Organization

Do you have any tips or other resources to share? How do you organize your fabric stash? By colour? by size? by project? What about your scraps? I’d love to hear your ideas.