Vendor Friends

We meet lots of people in our travels, both customers and fellow vendors, who become friends. Our friends Bruce and Diane Magdison own Sew Batik. I love their fabrics and use them in some of my samples. Here's one example of a table runner I made with one of their Tiki Rolls.

Bruce loves our little dog Rex who travels with us. His face lights up every time Rex comes to visit him at a show. When we were in Tucson a couple weeks ago we had a great idea. We'd make Rex the official Sew Batik Mascot. My husband asked Bruce for a piece of fabric for a secret project. Between that show and the one in Phoenix the following week, I traced their logo onto the fabric and embroidered "Sew Batik Mascot" onto a triangle of their fabric. It was a great way for me to practice my satin stitch.

I tied the doggie scarf around Rex's neck and my husband and I took Rex to see Bruce. He was so excited to see him and was even more excited when he saw his official mascot uniform. You can tell these two love each other!

Getting Fabric Ready

We are so fortunate to carry Rainbow Fabrics hand dyed fabric. We carry all of their three yard Rainbow Packs as well has hard to find skin tones and gorgeous individual fat quarters. However, I choose to display most of them differently than her other shops. So there is folding and bundling and labeling to do before we put them out at a show.

I received my order for the upcoming Tucson and Phoenix shows about a week ago and have been playing in 250 yards of hand dyed fabric since then. Here are some before and after examples.

This is 150 individual fat quarters. They actually come rolled up. So I unroll each one. Open them up and refold them so we can display them in shallow boxes.

These are the same 150 fat quarters (minus a couple that were just too gorgeous and they jumped into my personal stash) all folded and banded. Now those are ready to go.

Diana ( the gal who dyes the fabric) sends me each color way of the Rainbow Packs in piles of pressed fat quarters. I then go through and compile them into their sets of 12. Those are then rolled into the packs that you see on our website and in our booth at shows.

These pictures are of 10 sets of Tropical Rainbow, which happens to be one of my favorites.

This is what they look like straight out of the box.

Now they are in groups of 12 and are ready to be rolled and banded.

Here are 10 bundles of Tropical Rainbow fat quarters all rolled up and ready to set out at the show next week.

Now you have an idea of another part of what's involved in the before part of doing shows.

Hand Embroidery? Who'd Have Thought?

If anyone had told me a year ago that I'd be doing hand embroidery again (and enjoying it), I'd have laughed and said no way. My idea of embroidery used to be watching my sewing machine stitch it out and change thread when necessary. It always comes out perfectly and goes so fast.

When we decided to expand our product line to include Bird Brain Designs RedWork patterns and accessories for them, I knew I'd better try my hand at RedWork. I used to do needlepoint, cross stitch and embroidery but hadn't done any of that in 20+ years. Thanks to the patience and guidance of Robin Kinglsey from Bird Brain Designs, I started my first ever RedWork piece in October. While there is plenty of room for improvement, I have stitched three projects since then. I started another one last night. I try to spend 30 minutes to an hour working on something every night while watching TV. I find that I look forward to that time every night and really miss it when I can't fit it in for one reason or another. Who would have thought?

Here is a picture of what I've been doing. I still have to do borders and cut the angels apart so I can add their wings but the "hard" part is done.

The patterns are Guardian Angels and Friends and Family RedWork.

I never thought that I'd go back to stitching and it would be fun. There is a lot to be said for putting a needle and thread to fabric. Whether it is hand quilting, hand applique or embroidery, it is very therapeutic.