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

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.

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

Okay, so I have a new obsession and that’s Instagram. Instagram is yet another social media network, sigh, BUT… this one is all in pictures! I can snap a shot with my phone anywhere and y’all can see it instantly! Currently it’s an app for the iPhone only (I hear that is going to change soon) and since I am an equal opportunity sharer I find that wee bit hard to swallow. I have decided that since not everyone has access to Instagram I am going to randomly share the highlights here so everyone can be included in my picture madness. You know how much I hate to keep things from you. So here goes…

1.A magnificent little cross stitch gift I received from my friend Kaye Prince. She replicated my Modern Alphabet pattern in cross stitch! What?!?!?! Amazing is what!

2.The students of Missouri Western State University presented me with a cake all decked out in Parisville when I lectured there last week. Fabric + Dessert = Also Amazing!

3.The day I realized that my my bulletin board had been swallowed up by graph paper, fabric swatches and pencil lead. Snapshot!

4. A self gratuitous photo of my colored pencils, because many little colorful items all in a row makes me happy!

5. My new phone dock from Jonathan Adler. Get it? It’s a phone on a phone which is funny.

6. The half zebra half donkey (Zedonk) that lives next store was giving me the stink eye that day

7. That’s me in my favorite pink cat hat. It was cold outside.

8. A picture of my grandma, dad and two uncles. She was one hot mamma. I think I have those same glasses.

9. My back porch view at sunset because I was feeling all warm and fuzzy and romantic that evening on the back porch with a cocktail. Everything is lovely at sunset dontcha think?

Today is the day! Barnes and Noble Booksellers is practically giving away books! Just for today, one day only, they are selling my book at a whopping 50% off. Which is totally insane! I know. It’s pretty awesome that they are doing this for y’all. As my special little gift to you I have made a little wallpaper that you can use for your desktop, twitter, what ever your fancy is. The wallpaper might also be a little tiny sneak peek at what I have coming up in fabric as well. There may be some reference to a print in the next collection, wink wink. I know nothing slips past your eagle eyes so keep a look out! If you post the wallpaper on twitter let me know so I can check it out @tulapink, tag it with #TulaBN.

If you want to show Barnes and Noble a little love for offering my book at $12.50 today then be sure tweet them at @BNBuzz or hashtag your love on twitter with #TulaBN. This is one of those rare occasions where we can keep more stuff like this coming from big booksellers like Barnes and Noble just by letting them know that we are paying attention and we appreciate the effort for crazy little niche crafters like us. We are a small but powerful community! Go team!

Go HERE!

I am obsessed! Something you need to know about me: I am freakish about my bedding. I spend more money on sheets and feather beds than I do on groceries and utilities. I change my sheets 2 or 3 times a week, I iron my bedding before I put it on my bed. Like I said, slightly freakish. A well dressed bed is like a little piece of heaven after a long day and it seems that lately all of my days are pretty long.

Sooooo, I recently made some pillowcases out of some Prince Charming Voile I had laying around, just to see what they would be like. OMG! Heaven! That’s what they are like! I slept on them last night for the first time and I will never go back to regular pillow cases again! I used a pattern, sort of, from allpeoplequilt.com. I altered it slightly to fit my specific pillows better. They 100% cotton and 100% magical. They are super silky and smooth and delicious. The cases themselves whip up in like 10 minutes. I can’t wait for my new voiles for spring market to come in so I can make like 1000 more. They are a great little luxurious gifts too. I have been making them for everyone I know and we all agree that they pretty much make the best pillowcases on earth. I just thought I would pass that along to y’all. Go make some! If you haven’t sewn with voile before it’s not too much different than sewing with regular quilting cotton. I didn’t change my foot or my needle. I had to fiddle with the tension on my machine a little bit but not too terribly much. It’s a finer cotton than regular quilting weight so it’s a teensy bit slippery but nothing to write home about. I pseudo-starch it a bit first (I use Best Press) and that takes all of the fuss out of it. It’s truly delightful, for real.