Love Letter to my Quilter…

I make a lot of quilts, really, many many quilts. I design the fabrics and the patterns then I spend many hours cutting, sewing and pressing. I make custom backings for them and sometimes even design fancy bindings. The only part of my quilts that I don’t do myself is the long arm quilting. More often than not I have impossible deadlines. There is one person who always goes above and beyond the call of duty. This is my love letter to my long arm quilter, Angela Walters. Angela, I adore you! This post if for you and your formidable talents.

Free Motion Quilting is harder than it may look. I think it looks plenty hard but not everyone thinks so. What Angela does is like drawing with a 60 pound vibrating pencil. Most people have a hard enough time drawing with a regular pencil. The real talent is in the ability to approach another person’s project with the kind of reverence and effort that they put into it themselves. I was once told by an English professor that you should put as much effort into reading a work of fiction as the writer put into writing it. This is exactly what Angela does with my quilts but more. She doesn’t just read the story I have written for her she adds her own twists and turns thus making my story even more beautiful than it already was. Angela writes the ending.

Angela and I have been working together for just over 5 years now. I have watched her grow more confident and more talented over those years and she has watched me do the same. We have grown into a kind of shorthand when it comes to quilting. She knows what I like and what I want. She always delivers. Why do you want to know all of this? Angela has written a book that shares the process and techniques that she uses to transform a beautiful pieced quilt top into a work of art. Her approach is fresh and modern. She is the new authority on quilting for the modern quilt. Her book deals with motivation (getting started), Instruction (learning the designs) and Inspiration (applying these designs to modern quilts). Modern quilts often include bold color choices, ample negative space, irregular block structures or no block structure at all. a modern quilt is a hard thing to pin down and doesn’t need to be pinned down but there are a few things that one will run into repeatedly and Angela’s book deals with all of these things.

So if you have ever had a curiosity about free motion quilting or just want to polish and expand your skills then Angela’s book is definitely worth checking out.

Pattern: Stacks from Quilts from the House of Tula Pink

Fabric: Nightshade, The Birds and The Bees, Background: Free Spirit Solid S11 Gray

Quilted by Angela Walters

Angela’s Book: Free Motion Quilting With Angela Walters

Tula Pink’s Time Capsule

In just about a month I am debuting my 10th fabric collection! Can you believe it? I barely can. Everyone here in Pinkerville was racking their brains trying to figure out an amazing way to commemorate the occasion. We came up with this, The Tula Pink TimeCapsule and the event of Epic proportions!

I get about a billion emails everyday asking where to get this or that out of print, hard to find, no longer exists any where on earth… piece of fabric. The answer is always the same, it’s just gone. It doesn’t exist anywhere on the market. Since I have started this little fabric designing thing I have always kept an archive of everything I have ever designed. Of the 320 fabrics I have designed so far over 200 of those are extremely hard to find and long out of print. They cannot be replaced. I guard them like a mama lion.

What is a Tula Pink Time Capsule? You may be asking yourself this very question. It is a magical collection of 320 fat quarters, that’s 80 yards of fabric! Every piece I have ever designed including my two new collections, Nightshade and The Birds and the Bees (which has yet to be seen outside of my small Pinkerville family and the good folks at Free Spirit Fabrics).

It took us a long time to put this together, a lot of late nights spent cutting, pressing, folding and packaging each collection. I am proud to present this colossal collection to anyone who has ever dreamed of owning a collection that matches my own.

Here is how to play:  You will purchase a PDF printable Prince Charming quilt label from my online shop  and each entry will be assigned a number to win the Time Capsule prize. They are $5 each and you may enter as few or as many times as you please to increase your chances of winning.

For just 5 bucks, it could be yours!  Contest will go for 1 month and I will announce the winner on my Blog, Facebook. Twitter, & Instagram so nobody misses it.

Support Your Local Quilter

I whipped up this little gem for all the Tula Troops out there! Feel free to throw it on your website, blog, Facebook, or Twitter!  It is a .PNG file which means it has a transparent background instead of being a big white square. This makes it look great on your custom layout or themes.  When you go to resize the file for whatever application, keep it a .PNG instead of converting to .JPEG so it maintains the transparency.

So here it is, a fun little gift from myself to you. Enjoy! #SupportYourLocalQuilter