Rae and Carrie spent three fun days at the International Quilt Market to promote their new book Sewing Quilted Patchwork Jackets with Fox Chapel/Landauer Publishing. We also got to take a look at new fabric collections and the giant exhibit of quilts.
Business to Business
This event is dedicated to the quilting trade – business to business sales. Our first event on Friday was to present a Schoolhouse Session focused on the concerns of business owners with our talk “Add a New Income Stream, Let Quilted Jackets Refocus Inventory.” If you know any shop owners who would be interested in this presentation, please refer them to rae@fitforartpatterns.com. We also enjoyed hearing about the other soft craft books being released by Fox Chapel at this year’s Quilt Market seen in the list of Schoolhouse presentations. Check them out to find some great reference, technique and inspirational books for quilters!
We looked forward most of all to our book signing on Saturday at 2:30. Fox Chapel was giving away advance copies of each new book for the signings, and we were tickled by the number of folks lined up to claim a copy of Sewing Quilted Patchwork Jackets! It was such fun to chat with shop owners and others in attendance.
Amelia, our acquisitions editor, repurposed an old quilt top into a duster length vest for the occasion. What a great concept for the Opus or Tabula Rasa Jacket patterns.
Walking the Floor at Market
Between events, we visited several of the vendors who had supported our book with donated products. Three types of Hobbs Batting were used in quilted jacket projects including their silk batting, premium cotton batting, and Theramore batting. Stephanie, Hobbs representative was kind enough to allow us to hang the project with Hobbs’ silk batting at the front of the Hobbs booth, where it was admired by many. This jacket is embellished with raw edge collage and is reversible, making it the most complex project in Sewing Quilted Patchwork Jackets.
One of the kids projects was made with a series of fabrics called Legends of the National Parks contributed by Riley-Blake Designs. Naturally we took the reversible vest by the Riley-Blake booth, where we met Cindy, one of the company owners, and spied a few other quilt samples crafted from other prints in their National Parks series.
There are not many vendors at the Quilt Market selling knit fabrics, but we were on a mission to procure fabrics for knit bundles to sell after our on-demand Tabula Rasa Knit class is released (coming soon!). We are happy to report that we ordered a few groups of lovely floral and solid jersey knits from Stof Fabrics of Germany which you can expect to see for sale in the new year.
While walking the floor we ran into old friends, including Maria Travino and Margo Martins of the national office of the American Sewing Guild, which you may know is headquartered in Houston. We look forward to planning a virtual event about these quilted jackets for ASG members!
Before reclaiming all 10 of our Opus quilted jackets to bring back to Baltimore, we snapped some pics in front of the jackets which had been hanging in the Fox Chapel Publishing booth all weekend. Many thanks to the amazing Fox Chapel/Landauer team! We look forward to showing the complete set of quilted jackets at the upcoming Book Launch Party on December 18th and other local/regional events in the coming months. Meanwhile, we are gradually adding photos of all 10 quilted Opus projects to our Opus photo gallery, so keep looking.
We didn’t stay for the International Quilt Festival – the retail portion of the show – this year, but are considering it for next year. In the meantime, if you attended Quilt Festival, we’d love to hear more about it.
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Happy Sewing, Carrie
