Travelling Around the Quilting Blogosphere

Please join me in welcoming M-R as she shares with us her travels around the quilting blogosphere and a few photos of her quilts. No need to pack your bags for this fun-filled journey. She’s also giving away a travel-inspired bundle of fat quarters.

Thanks so much for inviting me to guest blog, Michele!

Hi all, I’m M-R Charbonneau and I blog at Quilt Matters. Even though I’ve been quilting since university, I’m relatively new to the quilting blogosphere. I started checking out quilting blogs in February when I was putting together a Tips and Techniques table on Quilt Journals for my guild. Wow, how that changed my quilting world — so much talent, creativity, and passion!

In May, when I started my own blog – partly because I think I was boring my non-quilting family and friends with all my ‘quilt talk’, but also because I wanted to participate in all the great things that I saw happening online, like quilt-alongs, tutorials, and giveaways — one thing I hadn’t really thought of was that people from far away countries might come and visit my blog to see what I do. Perhaps I shouldn’t have been surprised, but I was pretty amazed when I saw that there were people from all around the world, including Israel, Finland, Slovakia, and Germany, who found my blog. I thought that was awesome and it gave me the idea of ‘travelling’ to check out quilting blogs from other countries.

Since I signed my blog up with Quilting Bloggers, I knew that Michele had a great list of the blogs by country so I used her site as my travel guide and headed for Finland, as I’d had a number of visits to my site from quilters there. I thought that language might be an issue, but it wasn’t – and really, quilting is a universal language, right?

I had so much fun visiting the quilting blogs in Finland that I did a post on my little adventure: So, I went to Finland last night. I included links to all the quilts or things that I thought were especially interesting or inspirational; things I might want to go back and visit again.

I came away from the experience feeling so inspired that I decided to do it again, this time to Thailand. For this visit, in addition to posting links to the inspirational quilts that I found, I included one of my favourite recipes for Thai Green Chicken Curry. To my surprise and delight, Jill from Jill’s Quilt Site, one of the sites I had visited and written about, actually found my post and posted a really nice comment on it.

I’ve continued my virtual travelling with visits to Kenya, Chile, Washington DC and Edwards Air Force Base and Nova Scotia. I also did a Welcome to Ottawa post for Canada Day to introduce Ottawa to my readers if they aren’t familiar with it.

I’m having a great time learning about and getting inspired from quilters around the world. Everybody has an interesting story to tell and a quilt to show.

There is so much great talent out there in the blogosphere that I’d encourage anyone to grab a cup of tea or coffee or a glass of wine and give this type of travelling a try. It’s certainly easier on the bank account and you won’t be battling jet lag when you ‘get home’. And I promise you that you will come away inspired and energized.

I’ll be continuing my virtual visits and posting about them on my blog so if you’d like to come along, you are more than welcome! I also blog about my own projects (the photos in this post are quilts that I’ve made over the past couple of years), as well as other quilting-related videos, tutorials and information.

In honour of my most recent virtual and real trip to Nova Scotia (and my birthday), I’m hosting a giveaway of a travel-inspired bundle of fat quarters. Come by my blog between now and Sunday, August 28th and leave me a comment on what you would do with this bundle.

Thanks again for letting me guest blog, Michele!

Cheers and happy trails,
M-R

Please note: You’re more than welcome to leave a comment here; however, the winner of the giveaway will be chosen from comments left on M-R’s blog.