Have you ever been curious about dying your own fabric? Or have you ever felt that you are searching a particular hue and can’t find it? This is the place for you. Clothworks teamed up with RIT to do a little series on home-dying for quilters and the first post is coming soon. RIT generously sent me a box of dyes to test out at home and I got together with my Mom (of course!!) and some neighbors and friends to try out a bunch of techniques, make mistakes and try and get some results that we liked. In the process of dying a whole load of quilting cotton (and a bunch of other random items which I will also showcase here) we learned a few lessons, figured out how to get intense, fairly consistent colors and took advantage of the amazing color selection tool, the ColoRIT Formula Guide, that RIT offers. If you are planning on dying today or this weekend, I can give you a tip–Use the ColoRIT formula guide. It was RIGHT ON. All the recipes we used from it worked great and came out true to color. If you can wait, stay tuned for the upcoming tutorials and feel free to send us your photos of home-dyed projects. At the end of all this instruction, we’ll be giving away a box of RIT dye and a stack of fresh fat quarters for you to dye at home, so please come back and check out the tutorials during June and July.
Hi All: Winners have been announced for this drawing. If your name is below, you should have an email in your inbox. Please email me susie(@)clothworks(dot)come if you do not:
Tiffani
Staci
Terri
Pauline
Sophia
Laura
I found something really cool on the internet and I am hoping you all are game to give it a try with me. There is a neat website called Totally Tutorials that plays matchmaker between producers like Clothworks and crafty sewers/makers like you. We provide fabric shipped to your door and you put together a free tutorial using our products (we hope that will be some of you!). Basically we’ll do a sign up here and I will randomly draw 6 people out of a hat to be the tutorial makers, send you all the fabric and then you’ll be on the hook to make some kind of tutorial on your blog or elsewhere.
IF you’re unsure how to make a tutorial, here is a pretty good how-to by ArtMind. Totally Tutorials also has a link to a long page of tutorials that have been published and you can check some of those out to see how folks do it. And here is a link to an enormously simple yet beautiful tutorial to inspire you even further! So, if you’re curious, but green, go ahead and sign up and I bet you’ll be able to do it on your own. And if you can’t, I am sure we can work SOMETHING out!
So, let’s get to the meat of the sandwich here. I’ve got a big stack of fat quarter packs: 6 packs, each containing 9 fat quarters of a collection called Sophie. It’s pretty stinkin’ cute and has a featured pattern by Anita Peluso in Fons + Porter for some eye candy. All the fabrics are shown above and you can also head to our website to see all the other bits of Sophie if you’re curious. The tutorial itself can pretty much be anything that you make yourself AND that could explain to others online. If you have a sewing idea, do it! If you have a collage idea, do it! Just make sure to take pictures and put together directions for your/our readers. For even more ideas about tutorials, head to our Pinterest page. We’ve got several boards dedicated to tutorials and how-to’s. If you win, you’l have one month from the date your receive your goods to create and publish your tutorial on the web. To enter, we’re gonna use Rafflecopter so I can keep track of everyone and not get bogged down by counting comment numbers and cross-checking and other things involving a calculator! Scroll down to see the entry form. You don’t need to know what you will make in order to sign up–you can fill in that blank later! We just want you to sign on and then let the creative juices flow.
I hope this is fun. The added benefit is that if you are an aspiring, designer, blogger or the like, we will gladly promote you on all our social media once your tutorial is published.
Click here to sign up on Rafflecopter
Here are the official rules:
1. Only US residents
2. Contest ends 5/30 at midnight
3. One fat quarter pack containing 9 fat quarters will be awarded to 6 entrants. Entrants must agree to create a tutorial using the products and post it within 1 month of receiving their goods.
Thanks for playing!!
Fabric designer by day…watercolor artist by night!
Karen Roti, one of the fabric designers for Clothworks also spends her time creating watercolor paintings. She has been designing fabric for about three years and now uses her artwork for both venues. Her new fabric design, Garden Joy, is available for ordering and will ship in October and her paintings are currently on display in West Seattle!
“Not all my paintings turn into fabric and so I started painting, just for fun. I was surprised when people starting asking about them.” says Karen. “It’s just one of those things that started to happen. At first I wouldn’t sell anything, but then my sister went through my “discarded” file and took home four paintings for her own home. I was shocked at first, but then decided to try to sell the rest of the paintings and it took off from there. It’s funny how life works. Who knew the paintings would sell?”
Karen continues to specialize in flower images and is currently showing at the Hotwire Coffeehouse in West Seattle. 4410 California Ave SW 6:30 AM – 7 PM daily. The coffeehouse is next door to the West Seattle Post Office. Hotwire was voted the best coffeehouse in Seattle two years running.
If you can’t make it to West Seattle, you can see many of her paintings on her website karenroti.com and email her if interested. She also dabbles in photography, needlepoint, and gardening. She would be happy to hear from you. Expect the Unexpected!
Okay!! The random number generator has done it’s work and here are the winners:
Shawn J
Donna Rae
AND, I realized that I had to cut a second stack which means that I was going to wind up with 3 stacks so I put the random number generator back to work on a third!! YAY! I love giving away more.
The third winner is:
Rebecca H from WAshington!
I have emailed all of you and will send those puppies out soon. Thanks to everyone for playing. I noticed taht the folks who won have been dedicated followers and have entered other contests (several!) and it is always nice to see a winner who has already tried a few times finally reap the benefits! Check out the blog tomorrow for a really fun idea that we are launching!
I’m always really excited to share about what is happening with Clothworks and all the folks we work with for Quilt Market but it is also bittersweet. Most of you readers and sewers will never go to Market because it is a tradeshow for the industry and if you don’t own or work for a company in this category, you aren’t able to come in. So, in honor of Quilt Market, I would like to start a tradition of doing giveaways that EVERYONE can enter.
For this giveaway, I’d like to highlight the fact that our Everyday Organic Solids line has grown to look like a full rainbow. I have been eagerly awaiting this day because nothing gets me like a stack of fabric organized in rainbow color order–or anything rainbow for that matter. Book shelves, laundry and Legos work, too. For our purposes, though, it’s fabric. It’s a huge pile of 22 fat quarters of our lovely Everyday Organic Solids that are soft like butter and sew beautifully–and there will be 2 winners. I just made a dress out of the stuff (you can see it on Pinterest) and will shortly be posting a free pattern for a rainbow grocery tote with an upcycled denim bottom (get a sneak peek here). But I digress. As usual, this giveaway requires one thing. This time, I would like you to sign up for our newsletter. It comes fairly infrequently (it was meant to be monthly, but that has proven hard to maintain) but it always announces something really fun like a giveaway, new collections AND free patterns / tutorials. If you’ve already signed up for this, give it a try anyway because we just changed mail services and it might do us some good to get an updated address for you. And finally, please share this on Facebook to let your friends know there is a tower of gorgeously soft solids awaiting them if they win. The link to sign up to our newsletter is below, so please click on it and enter! If you are absolutely sure that you are already on our mailing list, go ahead and leave a comment here and I can check your address on our list and enter you that way.
Subscribe to our newsletter!
Other rules:
1. Contest is only open to US residents. (Sorry internationals! We have had lots of trouble shipping your goods and they often come back at additional cost.)
2. If you are sure that you are already subscribed to our newsletter, but still want to enter, please leave a comment on this blog post and I will make sure your name gets in the hat!
3. Contest ends Monday, May 20th at the stroke of midnight!
4. Share this on Facebook!
5. There are two stacks to give away. 2 STACKS!! YEA!
It’s true. We’ve been scheming a bit at Clothworks. There have definitely been some whispers and some, let’s not tell yets and all the stuff that happens when you have a BIG surprise. Well, here it is! We’re launching a 100+ strong batiks collection that is going to knock your socks off. It’s called Fresh Batiks by Clothworks and we have THE BEST people working on it to make it awesome and refreshing while staying true to the age-old traditions of batik art. With Quilt Market starting on Friday, we’ve been able to get a little bit of advance yardage and we are savoring every scrap to make some cool projects that we thing you will enjoy. If you’re not going to market, I will certainly share pictures here and on facebook of the beautiful Fresh Batiks AND we are doing a fun little window display showcasing some cushions that my Mom made. Each cushion that is featured there was made based on a tutorial that my Mom or I found on the internet for free and we have pinned them to the Clothworks Pinterest board. For those at market, there is a QR code they can snap to see all the tutorials but it’s much easier for you folks at home. HERE is a link to the pinterest board so you can have at it. And, we didn’t just pin the tutorials that we used. At this point, there are 40+ tutorials there and I hope to keep increasing the pins to make that board a really great resource for you all to find pillow tutorials. Some of them are very quilty. There are quite a few DIY/reuse ones that call for old t-shirts and the like. So, please take a look and have fun! Fresh Batiks by Clothworks will be in stores this fall (2013), so we’ve got a little bit of a wait.
Now, in the meantime, here are some photos of projects using Fresh Batiks by Clothworks and I promise we’ll have the WHOLE collection up on our website soon. It’s no easy feat getting 100+ different fabrics scanned and posted, so we are busily cranking out all our market stuff so we can move onto the regular work!! I’ll post pictures of the pillows from Quilt Market soon, and the projects shown here were created by Virginia Robertson, the designer of the collection.
If you’d like another way to get to the Pinterest board, here is the QR code:
Beach Garden Studio is one of our delightful local designer pairs, heralding from Bainbridge Island, just across the pond from Clothworks. Here are a few tasty images of what they have been up to. The project photos below are from Esther’s on Bainbridge Island where they had a celebration in honor of the launch and the above picture is a digital mock-up of a quilt using the collection. Click on that to get to Beach Garden Quilts’ site to buy the pattern. They’ll be featuring projects and fabric in their booth 1320 at Quilt Market.
>CONTEST CLOSED–Winner is Angela F. Thanks all for entering!!!
Hi All,
I just got wind of a really darling pattern using Clothworks fabric and thought, that’s cause for a giveaway! Meags ‘n’ Me has created a super pattern using Flowering Around by Beach Garden Quilts + Studio. Meags ‘n’ Me have been featured here before because they have a handful of patterns that use Clothworks fabric AND they also have a stack of other really great patterns for sale on their website. In particular, they do a really sweet block of the month called Squeal of which I’ve heard countless positive reviews. This pattern, Blossoms, celebrates spring with a flower-ish pinwheel pattern for each block and the kit we are giving away is plenty of fabric to make a baby quilt top.
The collection, Flowering Around, comes from some local Northwest Gals who live on Bainbridge Island and they were even featured recently in the local paper there. The collection is pretty hot off the press, so if you’re looking for something springy and light, stores have got this on their shelves. Here is a screen shot of the full collection.
Here is how this giveaway will work. Rafflecopter worked pretty well last time, so I am sticking with it. Click here to enter!
Alyssa Thomas of Penguin + Fish is not quite a veteran in the fabric design industry, but she’s on her way there. She is introducing her third gorgeous and playful collection, Critter Patch Organic, to rave reviews and lots of interest. She has an embroidery and craft book due out this spring and she’ll be hosting her own booth and schoolhouse at International Quilt Market 2013 in Portland. To celebrate all of this, she’s sent me a stack of process sketches and images from her work on Critter Patch Organic. Enjoy these and look forward to the September arrival of this collection. If you’re at market, you’ll find her in Booth 1319, right around the corner from Clothworks in booth 1314.
Critter Patch Organic started in part from our Penguin & Fish characters from our embroideries.
Here you see bunny sketches. It’s kind of more like thinking in sketches, versus actual drawing.
These show some of the early renderings, with a some different patterns and some different colors.
I’m working on a test cheater quilt that I will use at Quilt Market because the fabric doesn’t come in and get to stores until September. This is a good way for me to see the prints next to each other in a quilt. It will be printed at Spoonflower and I’ll quilt for Quilt Market.
And, drumroll…the final swatch page! It’s pretty exciting to see them all together, laid out nicely and getting along.
Marsha McCloskey, designer of the ever popular Staples, is back with a collection in deep blue. This is how she describes Everything Blue:
Think of a fabric collection gathered over time where the colors look great together, but don’t quite match. Everything Blue is a line of over 30 pieces in just blues. It includes light, medium, and dark values in prints from small dots to large-scale romantic florals. The palette of warm white, to Chambray, to Indigo, is a delight to the quilter who loves blue and is always looking to enrich the fabric collection.
Here is a snapshot of her full collection (and a little sneak peak of our new website which will be launching in summer!)
For those of you who will be at Portland Quilt Market, Marsha McCloskey can be found in Booth 1318, not far from Clothworks in Booth 1314.
For Everything Blue, McCloskey has developed 3 new quilt patterns that she will be launching at Quilt Market in Portland. Each one reveals her love of stars and are heirloom quality.
Marsha sent me a sneak peak of those patterns which I will share with you here. She had done such a beautiful job of adapting her feathered star patterns to feature all blue–she calls them two color, but I see quite a few shades of blue in there. You could easily substitute any color of your choice in there if you want to make a quilt in a different shade.
The first two patterns come with full instructions and a custom ruler. The third pattern is more involved and is in book form. The Feathered Star Ruler is recommended.
FSSP1 Massachusetts Cross & Crown with the Precision Trimmer 6 ruler by Marsha McCloskey. Step by step instructions for 65″ x 76″ quilt.
FSSP7 Blueberry Delight by Marsha McCloskey Easy Piecing with the Precision Trimmer 6 ruler. Step by step instructions for 60″ x 60″ quilt.
FSP14- Star of Chamblie: A Feathered Star Sampler Quilt by Marsha McCloskey Step by step instructions for a Feathered Star Sampler Quilt in six different sizes. Feathered Star Ruler recommended. AVAILABLE JUNE 2013
In addition to these gorgeous patterns, Everything Blue has already inspired one of our favorite pattern designers, Rochelle Martin of Cottage Quilt Designs. This quilt is called Argyle Blues which is what I felt when I shrunk a beautiful wool argyle sweater, but this quilt puts a different meaning to the blues! Click here to purchase this pattern and see all the other beauties for sale at Cottage Quilt Designs.
International Quilt Market is already here again and we are seeing quite a bit of preparation happening at Clothworks. Capsets and sales boards are getting cranked out, fat quarter bundles are being cut and tied, meetings are being set, quilts are being made for the booth AND we are talking with a handful of wonderful Clothworks designers who will have their own booths in Portland. There will be a series of posts about the designers who will be there, booths that will be featuring quilts and projects made with Clothworks fabric, classes that will be offered by Clothworks designers (they’re called “Schoolhouse”) AND some tidbits about the chaos here.
Here is a little summary of what I know so far about spring market.
What: International Quilt Market
Where: Portland, Oregon
When: May 17-19, 2013
Who: Quilt Market caters to the trade, so it’s packed with fabric companies like us, pattern and textile designers (like many of you) and all kinds of other folks who make great stuff for quilters–like sewing machine makers, thread makers, batting makers, ruler makers, and all manner of gizmos to make our lives easier and get us to sew more!! And, then, occasionally, there are some moms and kids and husbands and friends who have guest passes so they can see their loved ones in action.
And, since it’s in Portland, Clothworks will have the honor of bringing a bunch more of our lovely staff to see the Market and talk with a handful of designers who make fabric designs for us. One of the best parts of market is walking the show floor and looking at all the beautiful quilts and projects, getting new ideas for projects and talking to folks who might want to share patterns and ideas with you folks via The Works. I’ll be posting pictures on facebook while I am there and hopefully recapping all of that once I get back!
To start you off, here is a list of the folks who will be at Quilt Market and these links go to the collections that they’re launching at Market.
Feathered Star Productions
The Quilt Patch
Beach Garden Studio
Penguin & Fish
La Todera
Secret surprise! I can’t say more than that, but we’ve got some pretty good stuff up our sleeve at Clothworks. Stay tuned for that (and it WILL include giveaways, of course!!)
