Quote of the Week:

Ask not what your fabric can do for you, but what you can do for your fabric . . .

My goodness, has it really been two weeks since our last posting? Where has the time gone? Now I do know that I sent one thousand apologies to you all last time I had a little lapse, so I am sending two thousand this time to make up for it . . .

But in all fairness . . . we have just recently returned from the Australasian Quilt Market which is held twice a year here in Australia, Sydney in June and Melbourne in Novmeber, which is the one that we were part of.

It was our very first time there as 'designers' under the banner "Pattern Press" which is our distributors name, who happens to be Helen Stubbings of Hugs n Kisses . She has encouraged and supported us over the last couple of months and we are most grateful to her for this support.

It was lots of fun at Market and a good chance to catch up with other shop owners who share the same love, and even better because they liked what we were doing with the felted wool!! We had a great response, given that we are trying to introduce something new to shop owners with the felted wool - hopefully their customers will like what we are doing & have a dabble in it themselves!

The photo at the top is a close up of part of one of the new designs that we took along called "From My Garden" and below is another of the whole piece.

Here's another design called "Love Apple" which is a penny rug table topper. Both designs would look equally as good in cotton, but we do loooove working with the felted wool . . . .

It was also really nice to meet Jhoanna for the first time from One Red Robin who also goes under the "Pattern Press" banner with her fantastic range of softies which proved to be extremely popular! She is a beautiful person with an enormous amount of talent and it was great to share the booth with her, listening to people oohing and aahing over her designs! Be sure to pop over to her blog and say hi - she was sensible and took a camera (something that we left behind!) so if you want to see some photos of the booth, this is the place to see them!

So here we are again, back at our gorgeous shop (well, we think it is !!) working on our next 'crisis' - making up all of our samples to take the Australasian Quilt Convention which is to be held from the 26th February to 1st March, 2009 at the Royal Exhibition Building in Melbourne. This is different to Quilt Market (which is a wholesalers market). Here we take our 'shop' and sell to the general public - they get to have a taste of what we do here at The Quilted Crow by seeing all of our goodies on the booth - Stand Number 180 by the way for all of those people wanting to visit us! So I guess you're thinking that we get to do lots of "schmoozing" - well yes - we do - but there is still lots of work to be done before the "schmoozing" starts!!

Having said that, I'd better be off & get to work on the 'said' samples. I've got Deirdre out back on Big Mal, as usual, quilting up a storm. . . .

Until next time.

Leonie & Deirdre

The Quilted Crow