To make this 48″ x 48″ quilt design, you will start with the central Santa panel, and cut up the Blue and White stencil blocks for the corners. You will use the Arctic Stripe plus 3 coordinates to construct the generous border. The Snowy-Starry Sky backdrop ties the scenic panel and border stripe together, giving this a magical Wintertime feeling.
Order the pattern as configured, or customize it to your liking with any of our thousands of fabrics. Just place your desired fabrics in your Wish List, and these fabrics will appear in the Fabric Selector below the pattern.
I feel the approaching turn of the seasons this week, as our students are going back to school. Several of our employees have kids going back to school today, and they are worrying about the same things we worried about one year ago, but now all those moms and dads have 16 months of pandemic experience under their belts. My kids are grown up and I just have one kid returning to college next week, but I guess one of the benefits of being an older parent is that you have a feeling in your gut that one way or the other, we will all get through this…together.
Paul and I recently discovered the show “Ted Lasso” and we are now caught up to the most recent episode which happened to be the Christmas episode. (The schedule is messed up we assume because of pandemic production disruptions.) I kept reading about how the show makes people feel so optimistic and happy, so I figured I could use some of that magic. By the time we got to the 2nd episode we were hooked, and laughing out loud, and maybe a few tears too. Plus the colors of sets and costumes are pretty fun – especially Keeley and her funky fashion sense! Anyway if you need a pick-me-up go get a dose of “Ted Lasso”. (It is filling the giant hole that Zoey’s Extraordinary Playlist’s cancellation has left.)
Remember the song from the Sound of Music – “My Favorite Things”? When we make our quilts, we can put our favorite things in our projects, and it makes us happy to work with our favorite colors and themes. I love bright colors, baby wild animals, and butterflies, so I made a little collage of my favorite things for you today. You can put your own favorite things in our shopping cart and then play around with them on our Design Board, and it is very therapeutic. Play around with soothing or energizing colors, with kittensor flowers, balloons or bicycles, ponies or chocolates, or whatever…and if it makes you happy….then I’m happy too.
Here’s a creative tip for all of you who have been told to just quilt with neutral-colored threads: Colorful Threads are SO MUCH FUN! There’s nothing like a set of new colorful threads to lift your mood and juice up your creative outlook!
…sharing your love of fabric, Luana and Paul
Quilt/Travel Calendar:
Aug 23-27 – Santa Fe Sept 27 – Anchorage Log Cabin Quilters Guild – Lecture. Oct 23-30 – Houston Quilt Market & Festival Dec 4 – Zoom lecture “Intl Quilt Trends” – Quilt Canada Jan 12 – Apr 9, 2022 – New England Quilt Museum – “For the Love of Gaia” quilt exhibit Sat, April 9 – “International Quilt Trends” lecture & closing reception at NEQM
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As a plus, you can also make some snazzy Halloween oven mitts from the rest of the Apron panel…just in time to pull out those Day of the Dead sugar cookies out of the oven! (Purchase 1/2 yard of Insul-Bright insulated lining to make one pair of heat-resistant mitts.)
Order the pattern as configured, or customize it to your liking with any of our thousands of fabrics. Just place your desired fabrics in your Wish List, and these fabrics will appear in the Fabric Selector below the pattern.
For those of you longtime friends and customers, we are turning the page on another chapter of Sophie’s life. By this time next week she will be moved into her new college apartment for her sophomore year of college. We can only hope that, with vaccine mandates in place at the university, she will have a semi-normal first year ‘away’ at college.
My mom had a fall and fractured her clavicle, and there were a couple calls in the middle of the night from the nursing home this week. However the smoke has cleared up here today (after weeks of dangerous air quality) so I had a lovely ‘picnic’ visit with her outside her building, which has locked down again due to new Covid cases. I am sick and tired of the whole thing as I know you are, but as my Swedish great-grandma said, we just have to keep-a-goin’ when we are tested like this. We count our blessings and send our prayers out to so many around the country and around the world who are experiencing fires, floods, war and famine. I am grateful that through our charity program we can continue to help so many families in such desperate need. I know that Mission of Love and Doctors Without Borders are doing important work on the front lines, and I am grateful for their courage and compassion…and commitment.
You will notice that we have a Nature theme going this week, with so many fabrics depicting wild animals and birds. The UN came out with a grim warning about what humans need to do to stop climate change and pollution, to save both humans and the creatures who share this one precious planet with us. Again, I am somewhat heartened that together, through our charity program, we can support organizations like The Wild Foundation and Ocean Conservancy. The forests, the oceans, the Arctic, and the pristine eco-systems need all of us to fight to preserve these precious and irreplaceable wild places. I have taught my kids, that when you feel powerless and hopeless, that is the time to stand up and speak for those without a voice. I promise, it will make you fell better.
So I thank you again for supporting the eQuilter charity program. Together we have raised over $1.8 million and we are truly making a difference around the world. Together we are saving children’s lives, saving endangered species, and bringing Hope.
…sharing your love of fabric, Luana and Paul
Quilt/Travel Calendar:
Aug 23-27 – Santa Fe Sept 27 – Anchorage Log Cabin Quilters Guild – Lecture. Oct 23-30 – Houston Quilt Market & Festival Dec 4 – Zoom lecture “Intl Quilt Trends” – Quilt Canada Jan 12 – Apr 9, 2022 – New England Quilt Museum (NEQM) “For the Love of Gaia” exhibit Sat, April 9 – “International Quilt Trends” lecture – NEQM
The main panel is combined with Hoffman’s Beach Day coordinates, and is the framed and surrounded by a mitered Seashell Stripe. This 65″ x 65″ quilt makes a fantastic wallhanging, bringing a relaxing outside view to the inside of your home…or perhaps a lap quilt in your snug beach cottage.
Listen – you can almost hear the waves breaking on the shore.
Order the pattern as configured, or customize it to your liking with any of our thousands of fabrics. Just place your desired fabrics in your Wish List, and these fabrics will appear in the Fabric Selector below the pattern.
The weather outside is frightful (heat waves, drought and wildfires) but the snow is so delightful, so this week I am bringing you to a Winter Wonderland.
Let it Snow, Let it Snow, Let it Snow! (Hoping that earworm will keep you cool for the rest of the week….thank you Dean Martin.)
I am sure you have heard about the supply chain disruptions that have interrupted production and delivery of a wide range of products during the pandemic, from toilet paper to car parts. Well guess what? It is still impacting our industry, although things have been improving a bit over the last month. However the deliveries of Christmas fabrics has been severely impacted, with Holiday fabrics being delayed anywhere from 2 to 4 months. Normally our peak stock levels of Christmas collections would come in May and June at the latest, but this year it is coming in August.
Christmas collections are seasonal products, i.e. they are mostly ‘one and done’, so we buy extra of what we think will sell best. There is generally no opportunity to reorder a holiday design once it sells out for the season.
Since we are experiencing ‘Peak Christmas’ right now, I thought it would be good to point this out and give you that insider tip that you should snag your favorites now while you still can.
I have a particular fondness for snowy scenic panels, and we know many of you do too, so we stock up on those lovely landscapes and Santa scenes. Many of them are digital prints these days, and I have to tell you the technology of these digital prints has come such a long way in the last 10 years. If you are still harboring fears about the quality of digital prints, I invite you to come on in …the water’s fine!….and these digital-printed fabrics are colorfast and have beautiful saturated colors with exquisite illustrative and painterly details. Gosh, it is such an exciting time to be in this industry, and to see digital technology having reached this level of artistry and high quality.
The best part about these digital scenic panels is that they tell a story, and to a starry-eyed child on Christmas Eve, you can get wonderfully lost in the magic of the story as you take in all the details that are packed into these amazing works of art. Take a peek at our ‘Peak Christmas’ categories and you’ll see what I mean. You just might need to make a cup of hot cocoa!
…sharing your love of fabric, Luana and Paul
Quilt/Travel Calendar:
Aug 23-27 – Santa Fe Sept 27 – Anchorage Log Cabin Quilters Guild – Lecture. Oct 23-30 – Houston Quilt Market & Festival Dec 4 – Zoom lecture “Intl Quilt Trends” – Quilt Canada Jan 12 – Apr 9, 2022 – New England Quilt Museum – “For the Love of Gaia” quilt exhibit Sat, April 9 – “International Quilt Trends” lecture & closing reception at NEQM
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To make this 59″ x 72″ quilt, you will start with the 28″ x 44″ misty landscape panel. Then you will piece 6 more impressionist coordinates from the collection, to make the mountain-themed border. (The mirror-image triangles create a sense of mountains reflecting in water.)
The soothing colors and Nature-themed scene is sure to bring a calming vibe to any room where the quilt is hung, or used to sleep or snuggle.
Order the pattern as configured, or customize it to your liking with any of our thousands of fabrics. Just place your desired fabrics in your Wish List, and these fabrics will appear in the Fabric Selector below the pattern.
My mother-in-law used to always say – Life is what happens while you are busy making plans. But my mom always taught me to Look on the Bright Side. So I have tried to teach my kids to aim somewhere in the middle of those two philosophies. Sophie is house-sitting this week, and on the first night a skunk apparently let loose on the front porch in the middle of the night. I went over to help her air out the house, came back home and realized my clothes smell like skunk. Well it could be worse. One of us could have been sprayed directly!
Even though the news has been bad this last week, the flow of beautiful new fabrics just kept coming, so that’s what we focus on from day-to-day. The air quality from the Western wildfires is just terrible today, but I keep thinking about those who are directly threatened by the fires that are belching out smoke now. I pray our family and friends in the Western states will be safe…and that we will not have another terrible wildfire season here in our area. As our exhibit “For the Love of Gaia” is being packed up in England now, I know that the message of the artists’ quilts resonated with the viewers there. We have got to start listening to what Mother Earth is saying to us.
Please Note: My Zoom lecture “International Quilt Trends” is this Monday August 9. (11 am Mountain Daylight Time, 6 pm British Summer Time.) You can pre-register now…on the Festival of Quilts site. Follow this link for information on how to register, and a DISCOUNT code just for eQuilter subscribers. Join me for an overview of the best quilts from the last year of virtual quilt festivals – you’ll be full of juicy creative inspiration afterwards!
…sharing your love of fabric, Luana and Paul
Quilt/Travel Calendar:
Aug 9 – Zoom lecture “Intl Quilt Trends” for Birmingham Festival of Quilts Aug 23-27 – Santa Fe Sept 27 – Anchorage Log Cabin Quilters Guild – Lecture. Oct 23-30 – Houston Quilt Market & Festival Dec 4 – Zoom lecture “Intl Quilt Trends” – Quilt Canada Jan 12 – Apr 9, 2022 – New England Quilt Museum (NEQM) “For the Love of Gaia” quilt exhibit Sat, April 9 – “International Quilt Trends” lecture – NEQM
Perhaps you have seen this gorgeous digital panel in our newsletters or on our website and wondered what to do with it…and now we have an answer! This week’s exclusive eQuilter Free Quilt Pattern gives you a beautiful but simple path to a quilt that will elicit gasps of awe and wonder from your friends and family.
This 59″ x 59″ quilt design takes full advantage of the rich sweep of colors in the selvedge-to-selvedge design, flipping cool and warm colors to create a complementary color pattern that is opulent and lush. It is made with the intricate digital panel, plus 2 collection coordinates, and a Solid Jet Black. It will be hard to cut up this fabric, but so worth it!
Order the pattern as configured, or customize it to your liking with any of our thousands of fabrics. Just place your desired fabrics in your Wish List, and these fabrics will appear in the Fabric Selector below the pattern.
Clearly we are living in times when we need to support each other and give each other strength. These days I am drawing on the wisdom that I have received throughout my life, from the strong women I have known. Many of us are having to be strong not only for ourselves, but for others around us. Through Faith, Community, and Sheer Stubbornness we are going to get through this pandemic and this year….Together.
If you have made any study of powerful women throughout history, you know that in order to persevere and stay strong, we can’t always be ‘nice’. To speak up, to name the Truth, to stand up for those without a voice, sometimes we have to be louder than our mothers taught us to be. As mothers, as grandmothers, as teachers and mentors, as guardians of young people in our communities, sometimes we have to step out of bounds for the Greater Good.
Many of us are fighting for human rights, for the environment, for social justice, and sometimes just for basic Truth. It can be a struggle to fight for something as simple as Truth sometimes. It can be painful to shine a bright light in dark corners. It can be exhausting to support and comfort so many people who need help now. But it also is incredibly empowering and uplifting. And I know these are times where many of you are discovering a strength you never knew you had. Our hearts are stretched to bursting, then forged in the fire of the moment, to a tenacity and courage we could not have imagined a couple years ago.
Within the approximately 150,000 designs I look at each year (and the appx 14K we buy for eQuilter), there are a precious handful that are about inspiration, strength, healing, and finding one’s Creativity and Truth. I snap them all up, because I know they will mean so much to someone who is going through a tough time. This one is dedicated to YOU, and know that you are not alone. We are ALL connected and we are all moving towards the same future together. You know what I mean.
…sharing your love of fabric, Luana and Paul
* Please join me for an overview of International Quilt Trends at my virtual lecture for the Festival of Quilts (Birmingham UK) – and please note the date has been changed to Monday August 9th at 11 am Mountain Time, 6 pm British Summer Time. Follow this link to registration and a discount for eQuilter customers. Hope to see you there!
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