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Holy grail

Carly Mul • October 21, 2024
builders

It is that time of the year again! I am leaving this week for Houston TX to attend  International Quilt Market and Festival. The last few weeks I worked really hard on making kits for my classes and making new fabric packages that got depleted in France and with online orders at collagefabric.com. My builders, the 20 pieces of fabric in size 4.5 x 10", are appreciated by my students as they are getting a good range of a color. I took it one step further: not only do I have packages in a mix of red, green, blue etc... now there are also builders in just bright reds, only Cardinal reds or dark reds. All different fabrics, but close in value so that you can really expand an area. The same level of detail is also available in every other color. In total I made over 75 ranges of colors, my favorite way of playing with colors. That was quite some cutting!


After the color packages, I added collection packages to the site and I am planning on growing it this way. New collections like Vibe by Quilting Treasures and Tea Dye by Laundry Basket Quilt for Andover that just came out are available in the smallest cuts that aren't anywhere else. I select these collections with a focus on their benefits for collage making. Vibe is great because of its color changes and Tea Dye has excellent more vintage/historic colors that are harder to find. Sometimes, I will get bolts, but that will be very very seldom. Like the amazing latest Kaffe, which is just a celebration of color! Every quilt I make has Kaffe in it and more than once his fabrics helped me go into new directions. I told you before that every quilt I made has his Lotus Leaf in it and I am glad he made new colors in those.


The intent is to have these packages for collage, but already some customers are using them for quick quilts, like in the style of the Villa Rosa Patterns and such. Each package is super coordinated, perfect for those kinds of quilts! A very economical choice as well. You can use the fabrics as is, but just one or two cuts will give good strips for blocks in the variety you are wishing to have.  Or when you are looking for good oranges to make a pumpkin table runner...it is nice to get 20 different orange fabrics in just one package! 

While I was cutting, folding and packaging all these fabrics with a big smile on my face, Jan, my husband said: "Carly, Houston is your holy grail, why else would you do this? " I think that he is correct. Houston is celebrating 50 years, I spent the last 20 years there. Still every year is new as well and this is the first time I am flying to Houston! This will also be the first time that I will teach two classes, have a quilt in the exhibition hall of the convention center and do 3 x 2 hours presentations in the Open Studio Section on the Festival floor. Instead of my unforgettable team, I will have three of you helping me with this. We are all volunteering for I don't know what exactly yet, part of the adventure. Thank you Jen, Laura and Daryl! I have prepared many lines in colors, because I am supposed to tell the same story  about freestyle color collage every 15 minutes... I'm sure I will be quiet after the two hours are over. Roomie Lisa may like that!

I am looking forward to seeing the newest trends of the industry, which I will share in my lectures later with guilds and maybe in blogs. Two talks are scheduled for later in November: they will get it fresh from the press! And I am looking forward meeting all the other fabric people, my friends, students, customers, colleagues.


Big news: My publisher, Fox Chapel, has set the launch date of my book for 2/25/25! I saw the cover this week for the first time and now it is starting to feel so real. I can't believe that a year ago I didn't even know that I would be asked to write a book! That was the Houston surprise of 2023. 365 days later and I am a published author attending the cocktail party of Fox Chapel and meeting my incredible editors for the first time. How crazy is this? Yes, Holy grail!!

They designed a postcard for me to hand out to people interested in the book... I will get these in at market...The first one is mine! Counting my blessings.


It has been a very busy travel year. The colors of Sedona have been put down in a new quilt, that just got finished. "Vortex" is made from my memory, not even a photo, after having hiked for days in that area. It is not how Sedona "is". It is how Sedona is stuck in my memory. How I remember this powerful place. The vast landscape, the red rocks with their horizontal lines and the turquoise of Arizona that like magic ended up as my sky. For a girl who grew up in Europe the incredible vastness of the American West is almost incomprehensible for the eyes. I soaked it up and the vortex helped me stitch it down with the tiniest fabrics. Not a freestyle color collage quilt like the ones of my book, but still very much collage and freestyle.

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