It’s official. And we are all freaking out in a very good way:

QUILTY MAGAZINE IS ON SALE EVERYWHERE! OFFICIALLY RIGHT NOW!

May 15th. It’s a date I’ve had in my lil’ noggin for a long time. Written in pen on my planner — I still use a paper planner because I have to, for my brainmeats — is the note “Quilty magazine on sale today!” in red. And now we’re here.

You can get the magazine here. You can get it at Barnes & Noble, at newsstands at places like Target and the airport (I think), at your quilt shops hopefully, and  anywhere quality quilting magazines are sold. How cool is that?

Pretty cool.

Enjoy, everyone. We’ve gotten crazy good feedback so far. All those nights I was up late, coloring the hand-drawn doodles and re-proofing the third article for the 9,000th time? Totally worth it. The projects are so good. The articles turned out great. The art direction rocks. It’s a good magazine. I believe that.

Go ahead: pick up a copy. I am sure — very, very sure — you will like it.

Guess who is making quilts?

Mondo. Mondo Extraordinaire. Mondo The Incredible.

Mondo is my cousin and I love him and his brothers and sisters very, very much. Mondo is getting super into textiles and patchwork, which makes me happy about ten million different ways. He’s a heartbreaker, too — I mean, look at that face!!! We’ll be having Mondo as a guest on Quilty someday soon. Until then, check this out, y’all.

And thank you, Mondo, for reminding me that quilting is for everyone, young or old, male or female. The language of quilts is universal. I love you, buddy.

p.s… You’ve got a pretty good teacher, kid.

Just a sneak peek of the latest quilt…

Do you love the big scale or what?? This quilt is going to be enormous!

I Heart Patchwork,

Mary

If you’ve read the Quilty blog for any length of time, you know that I love finding quilt-related or patchwork-related mentions in popular culture. It’s always encouraging and lovely to see a quilt in a downtown shop window, for example, or read about a famous politician who makes quilts, or notice a quilted jacket trend on the runway. Quilts are woven (!) into the fabric (!) of our culture — they’re not going anywhere, industry worrywarts be damned! (Excuse my French.)

Flipping through Elle magazine yesterday morning, tea in hand, on the couch with a very, very strong desire to stay there for awhile, I found this!

Me, I like the lower lefthand jacket best, and that adorable handbag. The pink pants…not so much, but who knows? Spring is in the air and patchwork is in the fashion magazines and maybe I’ll put on some pink patchworky pants and celebrate the whole shebang.

Start your next quilt. Do it!

Quilty magazine!

Quilty magazine!

AAGGGGGHHHH!

I signed off on the final page proofy things! Today!

Holy cannoli! Holy cannellini beans! SHUT THE FRONT DOOR.

It’ll be on sale at newsstands errywhere in May. It’s really good. It’s brand new. It’s fun. It’s chock full of quilts and tips and all kinds of goodies and friends and instructions and… Yeah.

Thanks to everyone who helped get it out the door. There was a lot of help and that is one big door.

Between taping LOQ, making Quilty magazine, planning the next Quilty shoot, being my usual high-energy self, and the rest of life’s demands…

I’m fine. Really.

There is a woman in my life. It’s time to tell the world!

Her name is Cindy and she is the Sewing Specialist for LOQ and Floor Director on set when we film Love of Quilting. Cindy — or “Cindy Lou” as I like to call her — is part lifesaver, part saint, part taskmaster, and definitely someone I consider a friend. She’s also a very, very good quilter.

She has a wall of patchwork in her studio and I absolutely adore looking at it whenever I’m here in Iowa. It’s inspirational. On the lefthand side, Cindy tacks up blocks and pieces and parts that were made with new techniques or were otherwise patchwork bits she hadn’t tried out before. (Yes, they’re all 100% “perfect.”) The righthand side is the section for the “Tried and True” blocks she’s working on for whatever issue of LOQ magazine is in production.

Thanks, Cindy, for your wall of color and and your generous smile. This stuff makes the world go ’round!

Okay, there’s more to come soon about the upcoming Quilty magazine, my adventures in hexagons, and general thoughts about applique.

Until then, is this not adorbs? It ended up in my email box via OpenSky. It’s a quilted bag by a company called Thursday Friday. See how it looks expensive! Marvel at how it’s just a picture! Gasp because you can put your stuff inside it!

Don’t you just love the world sometimes? Yeah, I know. Me too. (They even printed the bottom.)

I know city livin’ ain’t for everyone. But it’s definitely for me.

The city offers endless, daily inspiration for all kinds of artistic endeavors folks like me choose to take on. For a quilter, modern, traditional, or otherwise, a city like Chicago or NYC offers quilt inspiration like “cray cray,” as the kids say. Which brings us to a couple other pictures from last weekend.

That hot little number was just hanging in the window of an antique shop somewhere Midtown-ish. I walked past and stopped in my tracks. That is an old quilt. And yet so perfectly suited to a modern home. It dazzles me every single time, I swear. The old quilts are the ones that make me want to make new quilts. Black, red, green, and gold and white ALWAYS ROCK IN A QUILT. That is the lesson today, grasshopper.

Then there were these shoes beloved Trash & Vaudeville on St. Mark’s. Do I like them? No. Would I wear them? Never. But they are patchworky and therefore relevant. I’m picturing a drag queen with a neo-frontier woman getup…

And that brings me to my second thought of the day. Working on the Quilty magazine (it’s almost May!!!) has challenged me to think simultaneously about what works for quilt magazine readers (namely patterns, more patterns, and tips on how to get better at what we love to do) and also about what I believe people/women want out of any magazine (namely neat stuff to look at, well-written content, deals/scoops, etc.) As a magazine lover, I feel I can speak with some authority when I say I observe these things and they are true.

So when I post pictures here of patchwork shoes or the face of a skyscraper that makes me want to make a quilt, or when I show pictures of Madonna in a dress that Joan Rivers said looked like some disco-quilt hybrid, it’s because I believe quilters are not only thinking of quilting. We’re thinking of pop culture, of the world around us, of our environment. All the things everyone else thinks about, right? Right.

While the content of this blog and the magazine will always be relevant to the art of quiltmaking and the people who do the quiltmaking, I am excited by the avenues less explored by folks in the past.

The world is our pincushion.

And with that, a picture of me and my dear friend Sarah K. Greer having dinner. This is the least-relevant picture I may have ever posted, but it counts for two reasons: 1. Sarah has an original Fons quilt in her possession and 2. We decided NOT to smile in this photograph because I said, “Let’s NOT smile in this photograph and do it they way they did it in the old days.” And everyone knows quilts, like the one in the window in NYC, started back in the old days.

See? Relevance.

I secreted off to NYC this weekend to spend time with my sister and it was glorious. We danced, we ate, we shopped. I saw friends, I slept in, I even worked a little.

There are also several items to share with you, sweet Quilty reader. Let’s take a look at what we harvested from the weekend in Manhattan.

First up, I profess my love of Japanese-based clothing shop Uniqlo. I’m not an H&M fan — spending $4.99 on a shirt lost its appeal when I graduated from college  – but Uniqlo is a little different, I feel. The quality is better, the design is streamlined, and they make the most amazing undershirts. They also do collabo’s with top designers like Jil Sander (!) and their latest is with UK designer Orla Kiely, of whom I’m sure many of you are aware. Here’s one of the darling dresses available at Uniqlo right now:

I didn’t buy the dress. I actually have a waist, so getting rid of it with a drop-waist dress is like taking away one of my few actual superpowers. But I did buy a shirt. You’ll see it on Quilty, trust me.

Okay, so then I was in another shop in Soho called WESC; it’s another love of mine. Big sale. Huge. There was a gal behind the counter who was stitching something. I asked if I could see what she was working on and she agreed. The embroidery she was doing was for her upcoming thesis at FIT. (Remember when I lectured there with The Alliance for American Quilts? I do. That was awesome!) Anyway, the girl’s name was Jessica and here she is with the project that will ultimately help her get a dream job. Clearly, she’s going to be just fine.

There are more items to share, but I’ll post them a bit later. Coming up: patchwork shoes! Antique quilts for sale in windows in Midtown! Me drinking soul-fulfillingly good espresso!

Oh, okay. Fine. You can see that now.