First really cold day of the season for us, windy too and time to get out the heavier sweaters! Orders are streaming in from Quilt Market, am always surprised at how some arrive so quickly. New Loralie fabrics, new fat quarter bundles, and the vintage apron panels that just disappeared are back in stock thank heaven. Now to carry it all upstairs to my workroom and start taking the pictures!

We got to spend some time with Loralie herself at Market and she is just as delightful as her prints and fabrics, big eyes, big hair, very friendly. Just as you would imagine her to be thank heaven. She and her husband run her business just as my husband and I run mine and they are within our age range, so we had a lot in common to chat about.

I had a long enjoyable talk earlier today with my dear friend Helen and we got onto the subject of quilt guilds. We both belonged to a large quilt guild in Memphis, TN and also a smaller more casual quilting group that met every Monday. Now that I have moved to Columbia, MD and Helen has moved to Wichita, KS, neither of us belong to a quilting group of any kind. Guilds are great of course, but there is often a high degree of organization, volunteer work requested, blocks to make for all sorts of occasions, charity quilts to make, quilt shows to organize....and it seems to me all this gets in the way of the real quilting I do for my own pleasure or my own family members. Not to be selfish, but for many of us there are only so many hours in a day! So we both sighed and wished for another group like our old Memphis one and wondered how we would go about finding it in our respective new cities. If this sounds like whining, so be it!

http://http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/11/22/AR2006112201978.html

As a further introduction to my blog, above is an article about us that appeared in the Washington Post last November. It was fun to work with the reporter on the story and the photographer actually became a friend!

Quilt Market Rocks!

We are just back from Quilt Market in Houston with our heads spinning as usual....so much to look at there and digest and all in less than 3 days! I got to meet Amy Butler for the first time, wow is she tall, and also nice! Said hello to Kaffe Fassett and simply love his new collections plus his newest book, Quilts in the Sun. He partners his fabrics with Philip Jacobs in the book, so of course I had to order some Philip Jacobs fabrics for the very first time.

There were at least 10 Japanese fabric dealers exhibiting this year...up from only 1 just 3 years ago, so we can all expect to see more of Japan's so beautiful fabrics. So many mills have collections that echo the contemporary large scale prints of Kaffe Fassett and Amy Butler, but I am sorry to say they are pale imitations and I will take Amy and Kaffe any day over any of them! Lots of new gadgets including the Bobbin Winder which I just got in stock and will be listing shortly....great idea, a little square winder powered by either electricity or batteries that can wind your bobbins while you keep sewing without interruption.

Other trends include more fabrics from Australia....I will be listing some of what I bought later this week. Less machine embroidery and more companies selling long arm quilt machines which I continue to test drive and drool over. I do think that will be my big pre-retirement purchase in a few years if/when I wind down the SusieCraft business. By then hopefully prices will be a bit lower and choices even more varied.

I came away just dazzled by The Quilt of Belonging http://www.invitationproject.ca/ . This is an enormous quilt which includes blocks from every country on earth plus all of Canada's native tribes. If you ever get a chance to view it, it is worth any trip to do so. We nearly couldn't pull ourselves away.

Welcome to SusieCraft! I plan to post at least several times/week and hope to hear from both my customers and other quilters, knitters, and crafters of all kinds.