Thursday, May 30, 2013

Desire To Inspire! - May Edition


We have a little business to get to before we introduce you to our next challenger in the Desire To Inspire Challenge. We featured Jacquelynne Steves' new book and inspiration before we left for Quilt Market and offered a giveaway! We are pleased to announce that the winner is:

 Suze said...
I adore your creations and your passion and path for life. The eye candy is absolutely enticing and everyone who sees is going to be lining up for a copy. Someone is going to be thrilled to win this generous giveaway of a cop of the book. Thanks once again for a chance to win an awesome giveaway.

May 24, 2013 at 6:07 PM

Thanks to everyone for participating. Jacquelynne will be forwarding your copy of her new book, Child's Play to you very soon!

Welcome to this month's edition of Desire To Inspire Challenge. We've been loving every project that we've seen. You can find every challenge by clicking the link at the top right corner of our blog.




This month, designer Linda Lum DeBono introduced us to her friend Colleen Gregory. Linda told us that Colleen would be up to any challenge. We were not disappointed!


Colleen made a set of coasters, placemats and a table runner from the line, Jeepers Creepers by Shelly Comiskey. The line is a fun Halloween line featuring ghosts, pumpkins, bats and other creepy creatures.




Linda: How long have you been quilting?

Colleen: I've been quilting for about 19 years but I've been sewing since 6th grade Home Ec class.

Linda: Who taught you how to quilt?

Colleen: My mother-in-law and her cousin taught me.

Linda: You have four fun kids and one busy husband. Where do you get the time to sew?

Colleen: I don't sleep. lol. Just kidding. I sew when the kids are at school. I commit myself to one day a week of sewing or crafting. [HG: That's a great idea!]




Linda: Your biggest challenge that you came across?

Colleen: It was tough getting started and deciding how I wanted to showcase the fabric.

Linda: What's your next sewing project?

Colleen: I have a few unfinished projects that I would like to finish! I am working on a hand applique quilt for my son. I have a BOM and a huge embroidery project that is on-going. Plus, you and I have the Sue Spargo Christmas quilt that we are working on together.


Linda: Which sewing technique do you want to learn?

Colleen: I would love to make a quilt by machine applique.

Linda: Thanks for participating. Are we still friends? The projects are darling. You're all set for Halloween table decor this year!

HG: Thank you Colleen! Dear Readers, please look out for our next challenge at the end of June!

-hg

Tuesday, May 28, 2013

pdq Club - May Edition And More Quilt Market!


Did you have a great Memorial Day Weekend? We had a relaxing long weekend. It was especially needed and now we are back at work here at Henry Glass. This week we are catching up with our monthly features and we're going to show you some more market photos. Here are some more photos of our booth. Then we'll showcase a designer's booth in the next few days.

We have our adorable stewardesses, Talia and Andrea, in uniform. They are showing off the grand prize goodies and the names of the winners of our giveaways. The ladies are standing in our demo area of our booth.




Across the way from the Henry Glass booth, Jill Finley of Jillily Studios, had her booth. She not only designed and put together her own booth but she did the same for the Henry Glass booth in Portland as well! You can see a few photos here. Thank you Jill for such an awesome booth.

Jill started working on the booth months ago. Then it came time to set it all up in Portland. Here's Jill and the crew setting working on the Henry Glass booth.


Afterwards Jill still had to run over across the way to finish setting up her own booth. Look at what Jill used for the flooring of her booth. The whole thing turned out beautifully!













In between all of this Quilt Market madness, Jill still put together a fabulous pdq* Club [*PRETTY DARN QUICK] project for you.



This project is so timely because summer is just around the corner. Perhaps you're looking to make a teacher's gift or you can make this fun project for yourself. Take it to the beach with all of your essentials. What fun! You can download the pattern here.






Thanks, Jill!

Here is the winner for last month's pdq* Club [*PRETTY DARN QUICK] drawing. E-mail your details here:

Renea said...
Love these pincushions. I will be looking for cute little dishes sew I can make these pincushions for my quilty friends.

Check back this week. We will have more Quilt Market photos and have the next Desire to Inspire Challenger project to show you! It sure is busy and fun around here. Show Jill some love for this month's project. You 

-hg

Wednesday, May 22, 2013

Quilt Market Spring 2013



Thank you Portland! It was a wonderful trip and our booth had so much buzz. We started the show with a meeting with all of our designers and the stewardesses in our new booth. Everyone was excited for the show to begin.

We'll start off with a photo of CEO Robert and our stewardesses in our travel-themed booth.


Our President, Larry, is standing in front of a map of "The World of Henry Glass."


The following are designer areas that showcase the different lines of fabric that Henry Glass converts and sells.





Come back for more Quilt Market photographs.

Jill Finley of Jillily Studios will be back here with her next pdq* Club [Pretty Darn Quick] project and after that we'll have the Desire to Inspire Challenge project.

-hg







Wednesday, May 15, 2013

Jacquelynne Steves Up Close



We talked to Jacquelynne Steves lately about her latest work. She did not disappoint! Make sure that you visit her website. We chat about all of the exciting new stuff below. 

Q. You've made some changes to your business model. Can you tell us a little bit about how it came to be and where you see it going?

I’ve been thinking about it for a long time. While I’ve become best known for designing quilting fabric and patterns, the truth is, I like to do lots of different things, and I like sharing those things. I love to paint and play with watercolor pencils. I like to cook. I like to decorate my home by repurposing old stuff (spray paint is a miraculous thing!) and creating new stuff of my own. Most of my creative background is a result of my mom’s and grandmothers’ legacies of cooking, sewing, crafting, and gardening.  


For quite a while on my blog, I have been sharing not just sewing & quilting ideas, but also lots of recipes and craft and decorating projects, too. But in getting some objective, outside opinions, I discovered that my blog appeared to be, at first glance, a quilting blog only. Also, it also didn't showcase my artwork at all- and that is a really large part of who I am and what I do. And in spending a really long time thinking about what I like best about what I do, I discovered it was kind of everything…. In the sense that I didn’t want to do just quilting, or just cooking, or even just artwork and painting. 






Right now, I’m getting ready to launch my new website. My goal is to reach out to a larger audience than those looking just for quilting blogs. I believe we are all creative and I believe that we all like to express our creativity in different ways. Obviously, if you are visiting the Henry Glass Fabrics blog or my blog, you are probably interested in sewing and quilting; but chances are you are also interested in at least some of the other  “home arts,” such as cooking, crafting, entertaining, gardening, decorating….. I believe that home is the best place to express our creativity. I would like my new blog and website to be a place where we can inspire each other and learn from each other in all of these creative areas.




Probably the most difficult part of my “re-launch” was deciding to change my business name. For a long time, I have been designing quilt patterns under the company name The Noble Wife, and doing artwork and fabric design under my own name, Jacquelynne Steves. It seemed to be a little confusing that people had to remember not one, but two names for me!  So, to simplify things, I decided to change my business name to Jacquelynne Steves. It makes sense because I will probably always be Jacquelynne Steves, so no matter what I decide to do, the name will always fit. (Like, someday if I decide to open a car repair shop, I can just call it “Jacquelynne Steves’ Garage” and that will work! “The Noble Wife Garage” doesn’t seem to work as well...)

Since I am going with Jacquelynne Steves for my business name, I wanted a tag line which was really descriptive of my business and what I’m about. I spent days and weeks jotting down ideas, driving my family crazy with questions and asking their opinions. I went through a stack of index cards, writing down possibilities on each one and then looking at all of them and trying to decide on the best one. In the end, I decided on one that I just love and think works perfectly:

It’s perfect because the “art” refers not only to the artwork that I do, but also the art of being a home maker and being creative in your home and with your family.


So the last 7 or 8 months have been pretty exciting- it’s really good to shake things up once in a while and take a risk! But to be perfectly honest, it’s also really scary! It’s so easy to just get stuck in a rut. However, I firmly believe in the law of momentum- 
an object at rest tends to stay at rest, but an object in motion tends to stay in motion…..

Q. We love your new book too. Tell us a bit about your digital publishing experience.

Over the last several months, when I was trying to figure out what I really wanted to do, I realized that one of my very favorite projects that I had worked on was my book, Fruitful Hands (Kansas City Star, 2011), because it allowed me to make and design quilts, make some crafty projects, develop some recipes, and then illustrate the whole thing by hand. It gave me the opportunity to use lots of different mediums around a single theme, and it was so fun to put together- I loved it!  I decided that more books were definitely in my future.



My new book is called Child’s Play. I am excited about this book for a bunch of different reasons...  The first reason is that this is the first book that I've self-published. (Actually, at first it was just going to be a quilt pattern... but then I started adding more and more ideas until it turned into a 55 page book with about 8 projects and 3 recipes... but that is just like me: I have said it before and I'll say it again, I am definitely a "more is more" kind of girl!)



When you do a book with a publisher, it takes a very long time- a minimum of a year. I was able to put this together and get it published in about 4 or 5 months' time. In working with a publisher there is also a loss of a certain amount of creative control, and depending on the publisher this can be a lot or a little. (When I worked with Kansas City Star for my first book, they were actually really great about including most of the projects that I wanted to do, etc.)

For Child's Play, I designed & made all of the projects & recipes, laid out the book, provided the artwork & illustrations, did the photography... being a "control-freak," it was appealing to me to be able to have everything exactly the way I wanted it (I have a bit of a rebellious streak and sometimes don't like collaboration... I just want to do things my own way...)



But there was also a steep learning curve regarding the technical parts. I had to re-do many of the pages several times. For example, when I got to the end and thought the whole book was finished, I realized that my page margins were incorrect and that part of the text on most of the pages would be cut off during the printing process. So….. I had to go and reconfigure every single page…. Yeah- I learned that lesson the hard way and you can be sure that next time I will make sure my page margins are correct from the very beginning!


Another reason I am really excited about this book is that I am offering printed and digital versions. So if you are an “I-want-to-sit-with-my-pretty-book-and-drink-a-cup-of-tea-while-I-peruse-the-pages” kind of person, you can order the printed copy (the quality of the printed book is really beautiful, by the way! I was so pleasantly surprised at how great it came out!)  Or, if you are an “I’m-incredibly-impatient-and-I-want-my-book-now-plus-I-don’t-want-to-pay-shipping-charges” kind of person, you can order the digital version.


The digital version also offered me the opportunity to make the book “interactive”- it has links to my website, social media platforms, etc. But also, there are links to a few instructional videos that I did- so say you need to learn how to make a French knot, you can just click the link and it will take you to a video that shows you how. (You also get the links in the printed version, but you will have to type them into your browser, instead of just clicking.)



Finally, self-publishing really helped me to keep the cost down- just $12.00 for the digital copy, and $15.00 for the printed book. I think that customers will find that this is an incredible value for all of the content in this book.

So now I have ideas for several more books floating around in my head… I just need a few more hours in my days to get them done!

Check out Child's Play here on Jacquelynne's website.

Q. How did you choose the name of your newsletter?

For a long time, we were just calling it “The Noble Wife Newsletter,” for lack of any other original ideas! But when I decided to change my business name and tagline, coming up with a new name for the newsletter was pretty easy. I decided to call it The Art of Home Companion- because it really is just an extension of what we’ll be doing on the new blog and website. I love the digital magazine format that we’ve been using for the last couple of issues- it’s so pretty and you can “flip” the pages just like a real magazine! It also gives us (my daughter does a lot of the layout for it) a chance to do pretty page layouts, and to come up with a theme for each issue. This past issue saw lots of butterflies to herald in the late Spring/Early Summer. You can click here to see our latest issue

It’s a free subscription- you can sign up here. [link] It comes out about 6 times a year and has projects, recipes, inspiration, new product previews, etc. I’m thinking about making a printed copy available soon, at a small cost (the digital version is always free.) 





Q: Speaking of new products- do you have any new fabric lines coming up?


Yes! I have a line called Kashmir which will debut at International Quilt Market in Portland, Oregon in May. You know, we’ve been seeing peacocks everywhere and I thought it would be fun to do a line with all of those rich, royal blues, purples, and greens. I think it will be great not just for quilts, but also for home décor, tote bags, etc.

HG: Thank you, Jacquelynne! 

If you want to win a digital copy of Jacquelynne's book, Child's Play, leave a comment here. All you have to do is tell her how much you love her work! Easy, peasy. For a second chance to win  a copy of the book, go and subscribe to her newletter.  Since most of the Henry Glass family is going to be a Quilt Market, we will leave the giveaway open until midnight May 26, 2013. Good luck!