We Skyped with Jay McCarroll and it was a a ball…He is a total crack up.

Then he hung out with us as we all showed our projects. He was so great about giving individual feedback to everyone!

Here’s the quilt I made. It’s similar to the other one I recently made.

For the challenge we were allowed to add all the solids we wanted, but only use the Habitat line otherwise. I took these pictures after washing the quilt so it’s nice and crinkly!

I used more of the line on the back, along with my go to Kona Coal.

On to other things!  The winner of Quilting Arts’ Quilt Scene magazine is Janine – keep an eye out for an email from me!

And finally, Action Kivu gets 50% of the proceeds from sales of jewelry from Ember Arts through Dec. 7th. They have some really beautiful jewelry – maybe you wanna do some Christmas shopping AND do a good deed?

I hope that you’ll take a minute to fill it out!

Thanks so much!

The winner of the Yoshiko Jinzenji fabric bundle is Lindsay – keep an eye out for an email from me!

We coordinated an anniversary swap and I was sewing for Liz. Her adorable little baby girl is right at the age where they can always use one more quilt to put on the floor, so I quickly put together a little one for her.

I had to use scraps she gave me and I could only add one new fabric. Obviously I added the yellow. Oh and I cheated and added the binding too. Figured a stripy binding was worth a little cheating!

And thanks for all of your comments on the Quilt Retro blog tour post. I used the random number generator and the winner is Anita! Congrats and keep an eye out for an email from me.

And meanwhile, are you going to Market or Festival in Houston this year? There’s going to be two different meetups kindly hosted by The Houston MQG. All are welcome and it’s always so much fun to meet other like minded quilters from around the country and world.

Go MQG!

The weekend started on Friday night with her talk. It was hugely inspiring and spanned her career, design process and inspirations.

Then on Saturday she held a beginning workshop.

We finished off the weekend with an advanced workshop on Sunday.

It was a really wonderful weekend. Everyone was so excited and eager to quilt quilt quilt after their time with her. She’s so nice and encouraging. You can see all of my photos here.

There’s a big article in there about The Modern Quilt Guild and how Latifah and I started it!

It’s a great article! I love to see a traditional quilting magazine directly acknowledge the difference between modern and traditional quilters with a very positive and accepting “there’s room for all of us” sort of approach.

This has always been my personal feeling as well (I truly can’t comprehend some of the feelings out there – in either direction – we’re all quilters and most of the world thinks we’re all lame!) and it thrills me to see it reflected in the pages of a traditional quilting magazine. I thought I’d post the entirety of Christine Brown’s (the magazine’s editor) intro to the the issue because I truly appreciate what she has to say.

Hope you all have a great week. I know I will because I’ve finished up my latest freelance job and I’m back to sewing sewing sewing!!

Hope you can make it if you’re in the area!

First off – 18 inches of snow fell while we were there.  That’s a whole lotta snow.  Amazing that this is only an hour and a half outside of sunny Los Angeles!

Those are the cars we drove up in. And we stayed up in those cute lil’ cabins.

We dealt with one vehicular mishap, but all ended ok and while there was some trudging around in the snow to get places, everyone was warm, inside and sewing, sewing, sewing for most of the time.

We were in such a great space! We even had a big cozy fireplace that we all gathered around the whole weekend.

The knitting nook was also quite active through out!

The women I’ve met in the LAMQG have become irreplaceable to me. I’ve made so many friends who I am certain I will still be sewing and laughing with when we are old cranky quilting ladies. This has added to my life immeasurably and I’m so, so thankful for what we’ve created here with The MQG.  I read on blogs that lots of you are having similar experiences in your local Modern Quilt Guilds and that makes me so happy. We’ve started something really great here.

Anyhow, I didn’t get nearly as much done as I could have… but you know what happened just as much as quilting? Chatting. Lots and lots and lots of chatting.

We all could have stayed for longer! And next year we will.

Many more photos here.