I had intended to write about our Quilt Sampler journey but had somewhat forgotten about it with all that has been going on around here lately. However, now that some of the emergency dealings have calmed down a bit I'm going to try to tell you about the experience.
I was minding my own business on about 4:30 Friday, January 14th and I got a telephone call. Just a normal day, thinking about getting ready to close down and go home, there is a bit to do here, you know. Upon answering the phone I found I was talking to Jennifer Keltner from American Patchwork and Quilting and Quilt Sampler. She wanted to let us know and congratulate us for making it in the Fall/winter 2011 Quilt Sampler. She would be calling back on Monday, Jan. 17th to work out details. She said they found that people need time to realize they have won before getting into details. I was told I was to check my calendar as of that moment they were planning on the photo shoot for the Apr. 11-15 time span. The big thing for me was that I had to keep all this a secret.
Heard from her again on January 17th just as she said. There was a lot of information involved in this phone chat. Good thing she was sending an e-mail with all the details in it! It seemed from that day on we were on "fast forward". Of course, throw in that I have no idea how anything works in the industry except our Shoppe. It was nice that a while before being picked to be in the magazine that I saw the "perfect" antique/vintage quilt top that I has already decided would be the Shoppe quilt for the Quilt Sampler if I was ever priviledged to be in it. I saw this at a Vintage Quilt Study group I go to in Raleigh. Pat brought in this quilt top that she got in Indiana. 
I was so taken with this quilt. It was my colors and shirtings and a take off on the common ninepatch. I took tons of pictures of it and the fabrics, only to find out that when I was taking the photos off the camera that the card died. Good thing for me that the group posts pictures of the quilts that are shown. This picture was taken by Brenda. Those at the group had never seen a block like this with a shared patch. They at first thought it would be hard to make, but since it was just a top it was easy to turn it over and see how the original quilt maker pieced it. It really wasn't that hard after all!
I'm glad that as soon as I saw this quilt that I started working on Quilt Pro designing the quilt. I loved this quilt, but since our Shoppe is so small and we have a lot of small quilts in here I wanted to make a smaller version, so I halved the measurements. It is a shame I didn't have the directions for making it all written out because I had from January 17th to Feburary 4th to create not one Shoppe quilt, but two quilts and in at least two differnt colorways. Well, since I loved this quilt so much I only submitted this one with two colorways. It was a bit confusing as I wasn't suppose to tell anyone, but I had to submit fabric samples. I was given permission to tell the companies I was looking at for the fabric. Of course they wanted to know exactly how much fabric I needed and when, even though I didn't even know if the quilt design or fabric would be approved, but they promised that the fabric would be available for a full year after it was printed and they would hold some aside for me. I also believed I should get permission from Pat to use the vintage quilt for my inspiration, but I wasn't allowed to do that. Then there was the small problem of another lady in the quilt study group who made a pattern from this quilt. I wasn't allowed to tell her either, but I found a way to see if I would be violating her copyright, so all ended well. I prayed hard that the design and at least one of the color ways would be approved. Both were without any changes.
Now I had until April 1-8th to get the fabric ordered, quilt made and directions written up.
Writing the directions was fun as I thought I'd use the strip method which I did until I made the first block and found that all the prints of this line had a one-way design.
Now I know that some of my customers could never live with this. I love it, but I thought I'd better fix the problem and rewrite all the directions so the one-way designs were going in the same direction. Oh, did I tell you that the quilt, or colors could all be rejected by Quilt Sampler? So now my job was to write up the pattern using the COMPUTER... most of you who know me know what this means! I did finally get it done and printed for them, only to lose the directions, but at least the directions were written for the magazine. They of course were going to rewrite them to their liking.
All the blocks got made!
Sorted by rows!
Had to cut the rest of the quilt.
Made a make shift design straight pinned to the wall, the design wall is still hanging there today!
I spent most of my waking time not at work piecing the quilt and then hand quilting it using an old fashion quilting design I found in this book.
My time was limited, but since I love handquilting I had to handquilt the sample. I did pick a design that I could stop at certain points if my time was running out. Oh, the sore and bloody fingers... Finally as the deadline was quickly approaching and I was somewhat panicing I asked Beverly to work on the sample for the Shoppe and machine quilt that one. We all know that she can whip out quilts in a hurry. Well she wasn't so excited about making sure all the one way designs were going in the same directions, but she was a trooper and got to work.
Finished! And no, I didn't get as much of the quilting design done as I had hoped, but it was enough. Maybe someday I'll add more!
Here are both the quilts together. Beverly's is on the left and mine on the right. Mine was sent off to Quilt Sampler and Beverly's was in the Shoppe. Well, if memory serves me it wasn't put up until 11am Salt Lake City time when Better Homes and Gardens made the announcement of who was in the magazines.
Oh, while I was busy with all the quilt making, I was having phone interviews. I was very pleased with the interviewer and how quickly she understood the Shoppe. It was just about a week after I sent in the quilt that the Shoppe was going to be photographed. I was told that they team would have a profile of the Shoppe and know what pictures to take. Kimber who did the interview had specific things she wanted photos taken of to go with her story. Since the Shoppe is so small when the team came we let them at it. By the end of the day we found that they didn't have the profile and hadn't taken some of the picture that Kimber had hoped for. At that point we were wondering just how our Shoppe would look in the magazine. I was rather disappointed that none of the cotton made it in any of the pictures since all our fabric is cotton and we live in cotton country, but over all I believe they got the story right.
I was surprised recently when I found that my interviewer was the writer of a blog I had bookmarked. You can read her blog about this issue of Quilt Sampler here: http://heirloomsbyashtonhouse.blogspot.com/2011/10/terrific-trio-of-quilt-sampler-shops.html
Here are all the quilts from both the spring and fall issues of Quilt Sampler for 2011 displayed at Spring Market.
The top two rows are from the Spring copy and the bottom two rows are from the Fall.
Here is a close-up of our quilt at Market. As you can see our name we named the quilt wasn't allowed. I still like the name I chose best ( Pat's Shared Nine Patch). I even asked if they could at least put Carolina Blue in the name instead of the Sweet Baby Blue they liked. Here I thought they wanted to represent the area.
Here we are at Market with our quilt.
The next to last day of Market, still not knowing the exact yardage Quilt Sampler was requireing us to use we had an appointment with the manufacturer of the fabric line we were going to use to be sure that they were going to have the bare minimum of fabric we thought we would need for the quilts. We still weren't going to be told that until the middle of July, magazine comes out end of August. Well to our shock we found out that the manufacture wasn't printing anymore of the line and they didn't hold any bolts for us. PANIC. ( this isn't the only "hiccup" we encountered, but I'll spare you the gory details. I did get tired of "putting out fires" Very frustrating) I am very thankful for the Shipping manager, Chris, who worked hard to get us the most fabric we could get. We had hoped to use all the colorways in the line that they had printed, but since they didn't do as they said we only have three color ways, blue, red and black. I would show them to you, but the photo thing on the computer will only have them sideways. We do hope to be able to offer other colorways in the future, so stay tuned. I don't think you'd be able to believe all the problems we've had trying to get those fabrics. Life truly can be stranger than fiction. I'll just say, I wish people would do the jobs they are paid to do. People must not care or realize that when they don't do their job it effects a whole lot more people than they can ever imange.
I think that is all for our journey at least for now as I'm being reminded of too many of the problems we had. On the bright side things are starting to get ironed out and I at least have time to write this. The rest could fill a book I suppose.
Oh, as a side, Quilt Sampler rewrote the quilt's directions for strip piecing! So if any of you have to have your fabrics all going in one direction you will need to rip out some sections or redo the directions for individual blocks.
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