eQuilter Blog

We hope you all had a lovely Valentines Day with lots of hearts and flowers.

QuiltCon is this week in Phoenix Arizona. eQuilter is the sponsor for the Machine Quilting Award, and I can’t wait to see who wins this year!

It is now 1 week until I leave for my solo gallery and lecture at the Kyoto Quilt Festival. I am still planning for an Open Studio on Sunday March 9, from 1-5 pm, before I send quilts back to their museum and exhibit venues March 10.

I gave a talk on Art & Activism last month for the Fraser Valley Modern Quilt Guild in BC Canada.
You can view a recording of that lecture now on our YouTube page.
Sign up to follow my artist blog here.

We are still collecting comfort quilts for those who lost their homes during Hurricane Helene in NC. You can either drop donations off *in person* at our office, or ship directly to this NEW address for distribution:

Shannon Townsend
57 Eden Glen Rd
Black Mountain, NC 28711

sharing your love for fabric,
Luana and Paul

Travel/Lecture Dates:
Feb 20-23 – QuiltCon – eQuilter is a Sponsor!
Feb 25 – Mar 5 – Kyoto Quilt Festival – Luana’s Solo Gallery
March 9 – Public Open Studio – 1-5 pm.
(March 8 – group studio visits by appointment)
Apr 3-6 – SAQA Conference – St Pete, Florida
April 27- May 3 – Alegre Retreat

Visit eQuilter’s Instagram, Pinterest or TikTok pages for Color and Design ideas.

See Luana’s Artist Blog, Flickr Photo Pages for travel images, comment on our blog, or follow us on Facebook.

Check out our Video pages for interviews and show reviews.

This week I’d like to share the work of a quilt artist whom I admire.

Niraja Lorenz recently had several works in the Lincoln Center gallery in Fort Collins Colorado. I’ve appreciated her work for awhile, so jumped at the chance to go see several of her pieces in this gallery 1 hour north of here. It is very difficult to choose which one to share, so enjoy this one, and I will share more work from this gallery on my photo pages.

From the artist statement:

“Inspired by both science and spirituality, Niraja’s art flows through her, teaching her about uncertainty. Chaos Theory has influenced her to see the world as fluid and unfolding, unpredictable yet not random.

She works primarily with solid-colored commercial and hand-dyed cotton. Using subtle variations of color and value, she pieces together thousands of bits of fabric, many less than an inch square and lines 1/4″ wide.

From a distance her creations can be interpreted in many ways: a magnification of microscopic particles, the vastness of space, a cross-section through the Earth, an aerial view of a cosmopolitan area, or all of these in one piece. Up close, her quilts reveal unexpected intricacies as ever more subtle layers of astonishing details are discovered.

After years of creating original pieces, she studied with Nancy Crow in 2007. Her work quickly evolved as she discovered that she had a unique visual voice.”

And yes, all those tiny stripes and snips are pieced solids. So for Niraja, and all of you who love to sew and cut up, and sew and cut up and sew some more….we keep our solid categories stocked!

Sharing our passion for fabric…..
Luana and Paul

Travel/Lecture Dates:
Feb 25 – Mar 5 – Solo Gallery @ Kyoto Quilt Festival Feb 28 – Mar 2
Apr 3-6 – SAQA Conference – St Pete, Florida
April 23-25 – Washington DC
April 27- May 3 – Alegre Retreat

Visit eQuilter’s Instagram, Pinterest or TikTok pages for Color and Design ideas.

See Luana’s Flickr Photo Pages for travel images, comment on our blog, or follow us on Facebook.

Check out our Video pages for interviews and show reviews.

Here’s an important deadline for one of your quilt projects:

July 4th, 2026

This is the upcoming 250th anniversary of our Independence Day. It is known as the Semiquincentennial, but I call it the Semi-Quin because I am finishing my 3rd quilt for this huge event.

After attending the AQSG event last year, I realized that 50 and 100 years from now, there will be people studying and admiring the Semi-Quin quilts we make today.

Would you like to join me?

In honor of Black History Month, I’d like to share with you one of the 2 quilts I’ve made for a Semi-Quin exhibit at the Virginia Quilt Museum next year.

It was inspired by a visit to Mount Vernon last year. Because my brother works as an architect in Washington DC, and because I love to visit the museums and historic sites in our nation’s capital, I go to Wash DC about once a year. This was my 4th visit to Mt Vernon over several decades. I have focused on different topics each time I visit, by signing up for a guided tour.

This time I signed up for a relatively new tour – The Enslaved People of Mount Vernon. Honestly I had no idea that over 500 slaves lived and worked at Mt Vernon during George Washington’s lifetime. So I decided to make a quilt about this, because I figured others would appreciate learning this important piece of American history.

I have also made a quilt about the Wild Ponies of Assateague Island for this exhibit, and I am finishing a larger quilt now to celebrate the 250 years of precious American Wilderness.

Details:
I used Golden Fluid Acrylics on an Evolon background. Then I freemotion stitched the architectural details, the red calligraphy is a freemotion satin stitch, then created the figures and trees with fused applique, and did more freemotion stitching to finish. It is 20″ x 20″ – stitched on Bernina 790 and Q20.

What do you think is important to put in a quilt, for our 250th Anniversary?
Please join me!

Sharing our passion for fabric…..
Luana and Paul

Travel/Lecture Dates:
Feb 25 – Mar 5 – Solo Gallery @ Kyoto Quilt Festival Feb 28 – Mar 2
Apr 3-6 – SAQA Conference – St Pete, Florida
April 23-25 – Washington DC
April 27- May 3 – Alegre Retreat

Visit eQuilter’s Instagram, Pinterest or TikTok pages for Color and Design ideas.

See Luana’s Flickr Photo Pages for travel images, comment on our blog, or follow us on Facebook.

Check out our Video pages for interviews and show reviews.

We are zooming into February which is a short month with a sweet holiday in the middle –
Valentine’s Day is on the horizon!

It is also Black History month, and I am highlighting 2 books in stock by Dr. Carolyn Mazloomi:
And Still We Rise: Race, Culture, and Visual Conversations
Visioning Human Rights in the New Millennium

We have a TON of new blenders this week – it is a good time to check out our New Color Palette category. (which is updated every week!)

Please note also that our 40″ wide Evolon (sold by the yard) is back in stock. We also carry sample packs, and 80″ wide. If you follow my artwork, my last few pieces have had painted Evolon tops! (with applique and then stitching on top of the painted Evolon.)

I am also using Gentle Fuse to cut detailed shapes on batiks and other fabrics, with my Silhouette Cameo digital cutting machine, and 54″ Mistyfuse for my larger art quilts. (For those of you who have been asking.)

In case you missed it – check out “Just Wanna Copyright – For Makers” by Elizabeth Townsend. The corresponding exhibit just opened at the New England Quilt Museum.

There has been much discussion about the SAQA Red exhibit this last week. If you are curious, we still have this exhibit catalog in stock here.

We are still collecting comfort quilts for those who lost their homes during Hurricane Helene in NC. You can either drop donations off *in person* at our office, or ship directly to this NEW address for distribution:

Shannon Townsend
57 Eden Glen Rd
Black Mountain, NC 28711

sharing your love for fabric,
Luana and Paul

Travel/Lecture Dates:
Feb 20-23 – QuiltCon – eQuilter is a Sponsor!
Feb 25 – Mar 5 – Kyoto Quilt Festival – Luana’s Solo Gallery
Apr 3-6 – SAQA Conference – St Pete, Florida
April 27- May 3 – Alegre Retreat

Visit eQuilter’s Instagram, Pinterest or TikTok pages for Color and Design ideas.

See Luana’s Artist Blog, Flickr Photo Pages for travel images, comment on our blog, or follow us on Facebook.

Check out our Video pages for interviews and show reviews.