New Hoffman Fabrics

I have just uploaded the rest of the fabrics from the Hoffman delivery last week. There were two collections, a useful tonal print from the At Home in the Woods collection designed by McKenna Ryan

and a feather print from the Gypsy Princess collection. These fabrics have a new pearl frosting to them.

Visit the website to order

2008 Quiltette Challenge

I have now received the fabrics I will be using for this year's challenge. They are a wonderfully rich peacock feather print with co-ordinating bali print. There are four colourways to choose from: blue, lilac, pink and jade.

Visit the website to take a look at the rules and also for ordering the packs. The closing date for entries is the end of August as usual.

Hoffman Challenge Fabrics are Here!

The fabrics for the UK Hoffman Challenge are now in stock. The theme for this year's challenge is a Fusion of Fuschias and all four of the fabrics must be used. I have put together some bundles containing a half metre of the fuschia fabric and fat quarters of the remaining three fabrics. All four fabrics are also available by the metre. Visit the website for more details.

New King Tut Colours

These are four new king Tut colours which I now have in stock - apparently more are in the pipeline! The bottom two reels reflect current fabric trends in America; dusky pinks and browns and teal blues and browns.

If you haven't tried this wonderful thread yet, where have you been the last few years?! The King Tut thread is a 40wt extra long staple cotton thread that can be used for hand and machine quilting and there are now 79 colours in the range. I prefer to hand quilt and was looking for a variagated thread that you could hand quilt with. These threads from Superior Threads in America came onto the market at the same time and having tested various other brands this was the one thread that I fell in love with. Most of my customers who try them don't go back to their old thread once they have tried the King Tuts.

Visit the website to see all the colours.

The UK Hoffman Challenge fabrics will be in stock in the next couple of days so I have uploaded these to the website in anticipation.

The Little Angel

After my last posting I thought maybe you would like to see the little angel who will be taking over the business when I die.....

This is Thomas doing his first show and tell and Quiltfest in Llangollen at the weekend. He has just made his first block, more of which below and this lady also had some 9 patch blocks with her for colour matching so they had fun showing each other their work.

He made his first block last week and did all the sewing himself. He picked the fabrics and all I did was cut the pieces out for him and start and finish his threads. Not bad for a 6 year old!

His colour choice is quite interesting but its refreshing to see he doesn't yet have any hangups about whether a fabric goes with another one or not and I think they actually work well together.

If you haven't visited Quiltfest before it is something you should try and do. The quilts and wallhangings are hung in a gallery and there is plenty of space for them to be viewed properly. It runs for the whole month of February with the middle sunday being a trading day. Visit the Quiltfest website for more information.

The Things Kids Say........

I didn't know whether to laugh, cry or be incredibly happy at something my six year old son, Thomas, said to me yesterday. In all seriousness he said that when I die he wants to be The Crafty Quilter because he can sew and is very arty. Is that sweet or not?!

Saying that though, he has already helped out at the quilt shows a couple of times and is well known by all the other traders. He likes re-stocking the thread cabinets and knows how to fold my larger sale samosas! He even has his own cardinal rule not to hand the goods back to the customer until they have handed over the money!!!

At the moment one of his favourite things is to have a block printed off from one of the quilt design software programmes and then he colours it in so I think I will make a quilter of him yet!

Watch this space as they say......