International Quilt Market this Spring is being held at the Minneapolis Convention Center in, you guessed it, Downtown Minneapolis!

I’m staying at the Best Western Normandy Inn & Suites with my two roomies, Donna Morales-Oemig (FollowThatThread.com) and Jeanie Sumrall-Ajero (KalCollections.com).

As hotels go it’s certainly not the swankiest, but it’s comfortable – and it has free Wi-Fi in the room which is a big plus in my book! I wasn’t sure when I first saw the building if the plaster missing from the outside walls was by design or because it fell off. Apparently it is by design – trying to imitate Old English Tudor styling.

This morning Donna and I took a walk to find some breakfast and got a glimpse of Downtown Minneapolis. It’s a mixture of old and new – towering glass sky scrapers next to ivy-clad brick buildings.

The reflections in the glass are quite spectacular, especially in the early morning sun.

Tomorrow will be a busy day – the first “official” day of the trade show. More photos to come!

After a very hectic couple of months, I am sitting in my hotel room in Minneapolis after my first day at International Quilt Market.

Three weeks ago today I moved into a new home – twice as much space, with a dedicated studio which has really opened up the flow. Still a few boxes left to unpack and lots of sorting still to be done, plenty of room to dance, and I could even lay a king size quilt out on the floor – if I really wanted to!

The project that has taken up most of my time in recent weeks is my new design collection – GO! Be Dazzled – which was introduced to the world at large today in my School House at Quilt Market.

Do you recognize the GO! logo used on the cover? GO! as in AccuQuilt GO! the fabric cutter.

This quilt was created as a Block of the Month to specifically use the dies for the AccuQuilt GO! Each month 2 blocks are created – they can be identical or use diferent fabrics and/or thread colors.

Each month one or more of the following dies is used:

• GO! Circle 2″, 3″, 5″
• GO! Stars 2″, 3″, 4″
• GO! Hearts 2″, 3″, 4″
• GO! Funky Flower
• GO! Round Flower
• GO! Feathers

The title of my School House was:

Embroidered Applique Meets AccuQuilt GO!

Subtitle: A Match Made in Heaven.

It really is a match made in heaven! The biggest challenge that most people have with any applique project is creating the applique shapes. Using the GO! cutter and dies ALL of the challenges go away. No printing of templates, no tracing temlplates and no cutting on the line with a pair of scissors. Simply apply fusible webbing to your applique fabric, place the fabric on the die and crank the handle. Finished in seconds!

I’m pretty excited about my new collection – and I hope you will be too!

Here are some close-ups of the embroidery.

I’m back, and more or less recovered, from 4 nights in Houston at International Quilt Market. This is definitely the place to go to find out what is new and exciting in the quilting world.

Quilt Market takes place in the George R. Brown Convention Center in Downtown Houston. When Market opens, you see all the beautiful booths showcasing their products. Everything is in it’s place, the carpets are laid and there isn’t a storage box to be seen. The day before was a different story, that I would like to share with you today!

Quilt Market opened at 9:30am on Saturday morning, October 10, 2009. The convention center opens two days before hand so that exhibitors can come in and create their booths. Noon on Thursday saw the Aurifil team waiting for their crates to arrive. A frustrated message went out on Facebook later that night – the crates had finally arrived at around 8pm, and a whole day of set up had been lost. Since I had no plans until my School house at 4:20pm on the Friday, I offered to lend a hand in helping them to get set up. Aurifil is after all my favorite thread!

9am on Friday, and two enormous crates are waiting in front of the Aurifil booth. A couple of tables are set in the booth, and the standard pole set-up is in place, waiting patiently for some drapes to make it look somewhat presentable. A carpet has been layed – a necessity if you want to retain feeling in your feet while standing in a booth for 3 days in a row.

The biggest of the two crates contains the booth walls that Aurifil uses to replace the standard drapes. And I must say it looks a whole lot nicer! This crate is locked with a padlock, and easy to open as Alex (Aurifil’s Italian Product Manager) has the key.

The smaller crate contains thread – lots and lots of it!!! It also contained the toolbox with all the tools required to open the crate which is well and truly bolted closed. Someone had a wrench – which took care of some of the bolts, but not enough of them to be able to open the crate.

This is where I decided to make myself useful – by going off to find some tools! Fortunately, the Brewer booth (who was hosting me) was just up the aisle, in even more chaos at that point in the day – with a tool box full of tools! So one fixed wrench and one adjustable wrench later, followed shortly by a hammer and a mallet, and all of the bolts were finally removed.

One thing I have learned about getting set up for Market – if you want to make any changes to the structure of your booth, you must have an “official” person do it for you. So down came the poles, and up went the Aurifil booth walls, nice and new and black – and covered with footprints!

Cleaning is not usually one of my strong points, but footprints on walls just have to come off, so out came my pack of wet wipes (I’m a Mom, and given the messes that the girls and I get into I should probably carry wet wipes with me more often) until Elena handed me a much larger towel and spray bottle of cleaning liquid.

From this point on, a remarkable transformation happened. Gradually thread stands emerged from the crate, and thread found it’s way onto the stands. A couple of beautiful quilts were hung on the (newly clean) walls, and the most gorgeous 1kg cones of Aurifil thread found their way into various places for decoration. Table cloths covered the tables, and a beautiful booth had been born.