(By the way… make sure you read all the way to the end. I’m celebrating big time, and have LOTS of stuff to give away!)

Quilt Market happens twice a year – in the Spring, always in a different location; and in the Fall, always in Houston. It’s where people with things to sell show off all their new stuff, and store owners (and their staff and teachers) come to find out what is new in the world of quilting.

For me, Quilt Market is usually a pretty momentous occasion as I usually have a new design collection to show off. It’s the light at the end of the tunnel, usually after several weeks of hard work and a fair amount of chaos. This Quilt Market is no exception!

So… What’s new? I hear you ask!

The answer is…

GO! Bloom

GO! Bloom – 14 individual designs using 3 AccuQuilt GO! Baby dies. In addition, illustrated instructions to make the quilt shown on the cover, and the four pillow tops also shown on the cover. Let’s take a closer look!

The GO! Bloom Quilt is 40″x40″. Click on the image above (and also the images below) to see a larger photo.

The quilt is created using some very delicious hand dyed fabrics from Ricky Tims – 2 yards of Spanish Moss for the background; 1 fat quarter each of Red Hot Mama, Dragons Breath and Cotton Candy for the applique shapes; 1 fat quarter each of Carribean Queen and Coconut Snowcone for the borders. And this gorgeous fabric will be available in a kit!

Then of course there is the thread. It turned out that the AURIfil Silk Hearts Collection (12 large spools of 50 weight Cotton Mako) contained the perfect colors for the chosen fabrics. So… if you purchased the AURIfil Silk Hearts Collection to make the Silk Hearts Quilt, if you have any left over, it can be used again for this quilt!

GO! Bloom Pillow 1 is 17″ x 17″ (to fit an 18″x18″ pillow form).

GO! Bloom Pillow 2 is 17″x17″ (to fit an 18″x18″ pillow form)

GO! Bloom Pillow 3 is 15″x15″ (to fit a 16″x16″ pillow form)

GO! Bloom Pillow 4 is 15″x15″ (to fit a 16″x16″ pillow form)

The 4 pillow tops can also be created using the GO! Bloom Hand Dyed Fabric Collection from Ricky Tims. (You will need to purchase extra fabric for the backs of the pillows).

You can let your imagination have a field day when finishing the pillows. The 2 red ones in the photo above were finished with a ruffle created using my ruffle attachment!

I’m super excited about this new collection and so I’m celebrating it’s “birth”! That means I’m going to give something away!!!

How would you like to be the recipient of everything needed to make the GO! Bloom Quilt?

What exactly do you need?

• the GO! Bloom design collection of course
• the 3 AccuQuilt GO! dies used in the collection
• a GO! Baby (since they are GO! Baby dies)
• a GO! Bloom Hand Dyed Fabric Collection from Ricky Tims
• an AURIfil Silk Hearts Thread Collection.

One very lucky person will win all of these goodies. All you have to do is answer one simple question:

What are the 3 AccuQuilt GO! dies used in the GO! Bloom Collection?

It’s been really hard to not give you all the answer while writing this post! However, the answer can be found in my online store. So… go check it out, then come back and leave a comment at the bottom of this post with your answer. The winner will be chosen on Wednesday March 25 at 10am Arizona time (that’s Pacific time during the summer months). It could be you!

There’s also a little surprise in store for anyone who pre-orders the GO! Bloom CD during the month of May 2011. You’ll also find out what that is by visiting my store! (Just so you know… if you pre-order the GO! Bloom CD and then discover you are the winner of the whole kit and caboodle – I’ll refund your purchase!)

Many thanks to all of my partners for donating their products for me to give away. And many thanks also to my super faithful quilting buddies at home for helping me to get everything done in time for me to be here at International Quilt Market. Quilters really are wonderful people!

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!

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.

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.