A very quick 2 week visit to the USA in May was an amazing experience… I left on 8th May at 6am and arrived the same day (26 hours later) in the picture postcard Salt Lake City. I love this place as no matter where you look it feels like I’m standing in one of those postcards that show snow capped mountains and blue skies. This destination was the location of the wonderful Home Machine Quilting Show www.hmqs.org where I got to catch up with some amazing friends, make new ones & also got to share 7 hrs worth of longarm quilting classes in one day with old & new students! I presented 3 classes in one day & we had lots of fun, chocolate & laughs along the way…
The amazing Vicki & Dick Anderson were my roomies for a whole week whilst I was over there. After HMQS finished on Saturday they became my tour guides & showed me the most amazing parts of the Pacific North West. We stayed near The Grand Tetons, travelled through Yellowstone National Park – even saw ‘Old Faithful’ do his thing right on cue as we arrived there. The weather was perfect & my hosts even better company than I could ever imagine. So many sights to see & laughs to keep us going. It was a part of the USA that I had never seen & I very much appreciate the opportunity that Vicki & Dick gave me to do this.
Wyoming – The Lodge where we stayed
Jackson Hole – Hotel for wonderful breakfast! Check out the antler arches. There were 4 of them – one in each corner of this park!
The Grand Tetons
Bear Lake
Old Faithful..put on a great show to at least 300 people.
Quilt inspirations at these hot springs.
Whilst I was over there I did find just a couple of new DVD’s to bring home for everyone. Jamie Wallen was teaching again at HMQS & has just been awarded the 2013 MQX Machine Quilting Teacher of the Year & is a very popular teacher at all the shows in the USA.
Join Jamie in this journey of transforming his Trademark classic and new designs to gridwork. Mystical Grids covers many new, different and exciting ways to make the traditional C-curve we have used in our grid work a thing of the past. No matter what form of surface art, quilting, pyrography, scrapbooking, human ink and all of the other forms, this "Workshop" is a valuable addition to your instructional and visually inspirational library.
This Workshop includes the digital book with bonus sliders.
Price: $AU52.00
Mystical Floral, Leaves and Vines Workshop
Join Jamie in this journey of transforming many variations of vines, leaves, ferns and florals into a Mystical array of surface design work.
He will teach you to use these variations in your edge to edge, border, sash and block medallion quilting.
This Workshop includes 2 DVD’s with over 2 hours of instruction along with a CD that has the companion book, viewable on any PC, mac or ipad, and the bonus printable practice sliders
Price: $AU65.00
Mystical Feathers 1 covers many different ways to use the classic and new style feather fronds. No matter what form of surface art, quilting, pyrography, card arts, human ink and all of the other forms, this Workshop is a valuable addition to your instructional and visual inspirational library. This Workshop includes a DVD with over an hour of instruction along with a CD that has the companion book, viewable on any PC, mac or ipad, and the bonus printable practice sliders
Price: $AU52.00
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Before I left for the USA I was madly quilting a new BOM for my sister, Helen Stubbings called ‘Cornelian. This quilt created a lot of interest, as I was quilting it, on my Facebook page and also International Quilt Market held in Portland, OR.
Since coming home we are thrilled to discover that The Quilt Show with Ricky Tims & Alex Anderson has announced it as their ‘quilt of the day’!
The Quilt Show.com with Alex Anderson and Ricky Tims's photo.
Quilt of the Day: Cornelian
http://www.thequiltshow.com/os/quilt_featured.php/quilts_id/1022143
Visit the link above to learn more about how Helen came up with the designs for this quilt. You can ask your local shop to order this 10 part BOM via www.patternpress.com.au It will be there soon – she is just finalising some inclusions in the patterns!
Tasmanian quilters can see it up close at the Tassie Quilt Guild show coming up very soon…end of June!
This quilt used 7km of thread just for the quilting. Approx 25 skeins of stranded embroidery thread was also used by Helen for all the hand embroideries. Plus there are over 700 hexagons in 3 different sizes included in this using Helen’s brand new ‘Hugs’n’Kisses Applique paper.
I will hopefully have some of this in stock in the next couple of weeks as well as it is fantastic for needleturn applique & any paper piecing shapes & you don’t have to remove the paper afterwards as it is semi soluble fibres!
The thread that I used in this quilt however, was all from Wonderfil. I do love using so many different types & brands of threads with my quilting & have a pretty major stash issue these days, but I was very impressed on how this performed on this quilt. So much so that I decided to stock the entire range of Wonderfil Konfetti cotton thread to allow everyone to purchase it.
I now stock the full range of Invisafil, Konfetti & Tutti threads from this company for you to purchase & enjoy using.
Cornelian used Invisafil exclusively in the bobbin, Invisafil for the red components on top & Konfetti for the tan quilting on the top of the quilt. You can visit my facebook page to see close-ups of the quilting on this quilt if you like.
I also have some more exciting news that will be available soon!
A1 Quilting machines have released the NEW A1 Platinum machine with a brand new stitch regulator that has some amazing new features on it! It has a 7” LED touch screen control on the front at your fingertips. I managed to get my hands on this new machine at HMQS & quilted a quilt from start to finish at the show in the booth. This is a dream Stitch Regulator that I’m sure you will be impressed with. It also features new LED white & black lights that can have the brightness adjusted to suit. Stitches per inch are now from 2- 22 and are extremely accurate. An improved basting stitch all whilst still retaining A1’s famous cruise mode for those of us that could not go without this. A new tie-off feature is pretty impressive, as is the ability to create 4 different ‘profiles’ that allows you to allocate which of the 4 switches (2 on each handle) will be used for each feature. So set your favourite settings and by choosing that profile it will always be retained.
We anticipate this machine will be ready to ship in approx 3-4 months time. In the meantime I do have a very limited supply of the A1 Elite Professional Favourite packages that I am able to discount heavily before these are ready to ship. Please contact me for details if interested.
The absolutely BEST feature of this new stitch regulator is that we can actually UPGRADE our existing Elite machines with this instead of having to purchase a whole new head.
I’m patiently waiting in line for my own new Stitch Regulator so I can be more familiar with it to answer all questions.
Until next time…
cheers
Tracey
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