Upcoming Quilt Shows In the News: Are Obama Quilts Too Controversial?
 | | click for information |
"Starburst II" was made by Chicago quilter Janice E. Hobson to celebrate her feelings about Barack Obama's election in 2008. It is one of nearly 60 quilts that are part of an exhibit opening Monday at the DuSable Museum of African American History in Chicago.
Like the other quilts in this show, curated by the esteemed Carolyn Mazloomi, this quilt is more mindful of the historic moment than worshipful of the man. But that hasn't stopped some furious anti-Obama fanatics from hurling crude language at both Mazloomi and staff members at the Chicago museum. I hope anyone who has a chance to see this exhibit will do so. Or you can pick up the terrific book Mazloomi put together about Obama quilts, Journey of Hope.
Click on the quilt above for more on the show, which runs until May 9.
Don't Miss This!
 | | Click for more |
Anybody who knows her work will recognize the above immediately as the work of pioneer art quilter Yvonne Porcella. A onetime operating room nurse turned fulltime artist, all her work radiates joy and has influenced quiltmakers for decades now. Not only that, Yvonne founded SAQA, Studio Art Quilt Associates, which has guided & inspired art quilters ever since.
A retrospective of Yvonne's work opens on January 18 at the Carnegie Art Center in Turlock, California. It runs until March 14.
Go and catch some joy!
|
Our Sponsor
Visit Our Sponsor
At UrbanAmish you will find fabric prices among the lowest on the web.
$8.50 yd... and direct from the fabric designer!
See rebate coupon at the very end exclusively for readers of this newsletter (and their friends...yes, pass this newsletter on!). 
These paper-pieced blocks were made using one of Yolanda's latest fabric lines: Landscape Quilter
|
 Who is Meg Cox?
Quilter
Journalist
Author
Teacher
Lecturer
Fundraiser
President,
Alliance for American Quilts
Latest Book:
The Quilter's Catalog --
600 pages of goodness & aid for quilters at every level
www.megcox.com
609-924-9135
|
What? You don't subscribe to this newsletter?
"This is the only e-newsletter that actually has news," says quilting icon Denyse Schmidt.
Every month, this space is full of news & reviews, an insider's look at the quilt world, prepared using the training and instincts of a former Wall Street Journal reporter.
Click below to join the subscriber list.
 |
Alliance Contest:
Start Making Your House-Shaped Quilt
Deadline: June 1
All quilts will tour and be archived at the Quilt Index permanently. A panel of judges will pick the winner of the grand prize: ANY model of HandiQuilter that YOU choose!
Click on the logo below to get the contest rules
 | | click for rules & info |
|
|
|
Greetings!
Happy New Year!!!! Time to jump into new projects, meet new people, test your limits. I'm starting my new year by doing something I rarely do, taking a full-day quilting class next week with two of my favorite people, Kaffe Fassett and Liza Lucy. I love writing and expressing myself, but fabric grabs me in ways that words can't. At the end of December's issue, I asked for reader feedback and I appreciate the lovely responses I received. Subscriber Jan Rodgers wrote: "I hope to keep reading your summary of what's happened and what's going to be happening for years to come. Not only do I get information, but you don't harass me to buy anything from you." And I don't intend to start! However, I am very pleased to announce the debut this issue of my first advertiser, Yolanda Fundora, a fabric designer whose brand is Urban Amish. She will be the sole advertiser for the next six months, and I've so enjoyed getting to know and work with her. I would not have accepted advertising from anyone whose work and business ethics I don't admire, but I think you'll find that Yolanda makes exquisite fabric and deserves your support. There's a short bio of Yolanda farther down, and she's giving readers of this newsletter a special deal on her fabric. |
|
The Fight for Your Money: The Chain Stores Target Quilters
Believe it or not, I bought this fabric at WalMart recently, and I paid $4 for 8 yards. You read that right. At a time when fabric at my local independent quilt shop costs about $10 a yard, WalMart is selling fabric for $2 a yard. Recently, I did extensive reporting for my column in the Fab Shop News about how some major chain stores, including Jo-Ann Fabrics, are going after quilters, and I thought my readers here would like to know some of the facts. As you may know, WalMart pretty much abandoned the fabric and notions business in 2007, eliminating staffed cutting tables completely from all its stores, and leaving precuts only in about 700 stores, as part of its "craft and celebration" centers. This royally annoyed those quilters and sewers who lived far away from any other store that sold fabric. There were many angry letters, even staged protests. At the time, WalMart was trying to change its image and eliminated a number of merchandise categories that also elicited shopper rants. After 9 consecutive quarters of falling revenues, the company finally announced last spring that they were bringing back these "heritage" categories -- including fishing poles and firearms, as well as fabric. Already, there is fabric again in more than 2,000 WalMart stores. And, as one of the company's suppliers told me (off-the-record, as WalMart is secretive and punishes suppliers who leak info), the company is purposely trying to court quilters with better quality fabric, greater choice and better service. How well are they doing? The supplier told me sales are up, and WalMart expects to have fabric in almost all the stores this year. At least at my local WalMart, though the section is quite small, there was a surprising variety of types of fabric, including attractive charm packs with fabrics that copycat some of the popular designers. There was a table for cutting fabric, though no employees nearby to do that task. While reporting the article, I also learned that the Jo-Ann Fabric and Craft Stores chain was bought a year ago for $1.6 billion by the investment company that also owns Neiman Marcus and Whole Foods. They're engaged in a major store redesign program nationwide and have worked hard to attract both quilters and young DIYers. As part of that, they are signing up major designers, including style icon Denyse Schmidt, who is now creating four fabric lines a year for Jo-Ann. (Under the label DS Quilts collection.) I was surprised to see the prices at my local revamped Jo-Ann's: not only did I see bolts of fabric by some of my favorite favorite companies, like Alexander Henry, I saw lots of fabrics selling for $9.99 a yard, and up. And did I mention the free patterns hanging on posts throughout the store? Pretty tempting. I bought some Alexander Henry skull fabric I've never seen, as well as some types of fabric like lace that my quilt shop doesn't carry. On top of all that, I also was told the Michaels craft store chain is testing pre-cut fabrics in some stores. What all of this tells me is that sewing and quilting are still heating up in the culture, and our "cult" is expanding. With these big players courting quilters even at a time of rising cotton prices, they must have big expectations for the category. But as a quilter, this is making me concerned about the continued strength of local independent fabric stores, which already have to compete with online quilt stores. (Did you know that Fabric.com, another company I wrote about, is now owned by Amazon.com?) So one of my New Year's resolutions is to spend even more of my fabric dollars at my fabulous local shop, Pennington Quiltworks. Yeah, I will use that $2 a yard WalMart fabric, but you can bet I would never put it into a quilt. Or anything else I want to be sturdy and colorfast and outlast me. Instead, I've mostly been cutting this red and white fabric into strips. It's cheaper than ribbon, and can be used the same way. (note: you don't have to be a member of the Fab Shop trade organization to get the Fab Shop News magazine: it costs $45 to subscribe to 6 issues a year. Click on the fabric photo above for the website.) |
National Search:
"Unexpected Quilters" Wanted
This is quilter Ben Venom, an art school graduate who makes quilts from old Heavy Metal t-shirts. You might have heard his story on NPR. But before they found Ben, I found him, and profiled him for my regular column in The Quilt Life magazine.
Since this terrific magazine premiered in 2010, I have written 10 profiles of Unexpected Quilters, and have two more that are close to completion and running soon.
I'm sharing this information partly because you ought to know that The Quilt Life magazine, which is supervised by and features Ricky Tims and Alex Anderson in each issue, is something special. Don't take my word for it: Library Journal voted it one of the 10 best new magazines in 2010. Although it always has a few patterns, it offers both great eye-candy with high-quality photography and articles worth reading about people and trends quilters care about deeply. It's also got humor and wisdom, offered in columns by such celebrated wits as Libby Lehman and Joe Cunningham. Recipes, even. You know, a genuine lifestyle magazine for quilters!
But I'm also launching a quest for new quilters to profile in my "Look Who's Quilting Now" feature. I'm looking for quirky, surprising and fresh stories. These don't have to be famous quilters or even famously good ones: I want people whose journey to quilting was wildly unlikely and circuitous, and whose quilts stand out for their authenticity or oddness.
So far, I've profiled everyone from a teenage boy in Colorado who is an Eagle Scout, to a California woman who became a quilter because her second husband's late wife was a quilter and left behind a HUGE stash. I profiled plastic surgeon Ramona Bates, whose blog Suture for a Living is about quilts every Friday. And Kay Gardiner who is pretty famous, but as a knitter, half of the Mason-Dixon Knitters duo. At the time of our interview, Erick Wolfmeyer was driving a school bus to pay rent when he wasn't making amazing quilts, and Janet Aguilar is a native of Nicaragua who never even saw a quilt until she came to the U.S. Much of our phone interview was conducted in Spanish, with her husband translating.
Janet, whose profile appears in the current February issue of The Quilt Life, was actually nominated for the column by her husband, Richard, an Episcopal priest.
Who would you like to nominate? Send your ideas to meg@megcox.com.
|
Meet the Advertiser:
Yolanda Fundora from Urban Amish
 | | Yolanda Fundora |
When I started talking to Yolanda Fundora, I liked her right away. She told me that although she trained as a fine artist and worked in painting and print-making, she left that world largely because she didn't like "all the marketing part, of going to lots of parties and shaking hands and all. It seemed like it was more about selling your personality than your art."
So instead, she began putting all her creative energies into designing fabric and patterns, and has found it a much more comfortable fit. I just love how she describes her work: "As a fabric designer, it's like I'm making crayons for people," she says, "So it's like a shared art, and I love that."
And, those crayons are truly dazzling!
I'm attracted to a lot of her fabric lines, but especially her new Landscape fabric line, made from sharply focused, close-up photos she took of river stones, the ocean, grass and other elemental building blocks of nature. These are strong images that can be used in both traditional and art quilts in so many different ways.
Yolanda isn't one of the big-name fabric designers, partly because she still would rather do the work than promote it. But she has lots of experience with such fabric companies as Free Spirit, Windham and Northcott. She has designed for Blank Quilting for several years, and brings out four or five fabric lines a year.
People tend to find out about Urban Amish by word of mouth, or magazine articles, and I hope that more find her gorgeous fabric through her ads in this newsletter, starting now. Yolanda tells me she has about 300 bolts of fabric in her basement, and she'd love to ship some of it to your house!
Give her a big welcome, and whether or not you use the rebate coupon below, go check out here website at www.urban-amish.com.
Thanks for joining me here, Yolanda! Since we are both Jersey girls now, I hope to get to meet you in person some time this year. |
|
|
|
Thanks for spending some time with me this month. I hope our paths cross in the new year, and that this is the banner year when you finish all your UFOs, master a new technique, and get the sewing studio of your dreams, one way or another.
|
|
Quilt On!
Meg Cox
Quilt Journalist Tells All!
Tiny print: this free newsletter is written and copyrighted by journalist Meg Cox, who protects her mailing list like a Mama grizzly. If you are getting weird emails, look elsewhere for a cause. If you liked this issue, please forward it to anyone who might enjoy it too. If you wish to hire Meg for a lecture or workshop, or share a scoop, hit reply.
Find Meg at Facebook at www.facebook.com/meg.cox1
|
|
|
