Happy Chinese New Year!
and
January Free Quilt Block Patterns

Greetings -

This came across my desk not long ago - American Patchwork & Quilting's 1 million Pillowcase Challenge. This is a wonderful way to turn your love of quilting and sewing into messages of comfort, hope and love - for a foster child, a cancer patient, victims of domestic violence, and others.

The idea is simple - make and donate pillowcases to local charities in your community and let American Patchwork & Quilting how many you have donated. They are counting here: 1 million Pillowcase Challenge.

For those who are interested in our Business in a Box webinar series, I've lined up an exciting speaker for our February webinar who will talk about Grassroots Marketing, which is perfect for those of us who are selling our wares in our local communities, whether it is in a shop or at craft fairs or other venues.

Jeff also has great ideas for those of us who are online as well.

As always, these are free to those who attend. There will be notifications in this online newsletter, but to get even more information, join the email list that is specific to the Business in a Box:

Business in a Box email notifications:

And tomorrow our Business in a Box webinar will be about the "business of the business" - for more information and to register for the FREE webinar, visit:

Business in a Box Webinar

Have a fabulous week; enjoy the news and Happy Quilting!

penny halgren quilter

Master Quilter

P.S. I wish it weren't so, but I'm back on my Every Other Day Diet! As diets go, it's great. Good food, easy to manage and I get to eat what I want every other day -

Who Else Wants to Unlock the Mysteries
of Designing Quilts?

I wonder if designing a quilt is like the kid who picks up his first basketball at age 3 and immediately plunks it perfectly through the net like a pro.

Or the 5 year old who just "knows" how to play the piano.

It seems like there are just some quilters who pick up fabric, cut it up, and instantly have an original design quilt.

Frankly, I've never been able to do that.

For years all I would do was buy a pattern and make the quilts - usually even copying the fabrics (or the colors of the fabrics) in the pattern I bought.

Baby quilts were the exception - I appliqued a bunch of hearts onto 4 inch square pieces of fabric and put them together in various ways - with sashing, without sashing, on point, etc.

Not all that creative, but it was the best I could do.

One day I bought a book with a picture of a wall hanging I really liked. It was a 3 dimensional type design - the floating boxes.

I made a bunch of boxes - using the colors in the picture of the wall hanging.

But, then I decided I didn't really like the way the blocks were set in the background, so I decided to create my own background.

That was a real departure, and I ended up happy with the quilt - although it was a one-time thing, and not a quilt using traditional blocks.

Out of frustration, I decided to take a workshop and learn how to design a quilt.

After all, that seems like the solution to many quilting problems.

It all sounded wonderful and so easy!

That, too, ended up being a very frustrating experience. But it started me to thinking about what goes into designing a quilt, really.

After years of study, it turns out that there are a few key components to designing quilts. And once you know your options, designing quilts becomes easy!

Tell me more about designing quilts - - -

Whether this quilt appeals to you has to do with personal preference. Yet it is an example of the various choices you have as you design your quilts. You'll learn the Keys in this Live Webinar.

5 Years Worth of Quilting Resources Can Be YOURS - - Without the Hassle and Years of Collecting

Ask any quilter what they want more of, and it’s always “more quilt block patterns along with tips and shortcut techniques for sewing blocks and quilts together.”

Have you ever looked to find a book with quilt block patterns that you could just look through whenever you want to create a new quilt?

Sounds easy, doesn’t it? I used to think it was.

Getting the patterns is easy, but the templates - - that's a different story.

Now you can have hundreds of quilt block patterns - including full size templates - plus dozens of tips, techniques, and quilt ideas - all in one convenient place, right at your fingertips.

Tell me more - - -

quilt block patterns

Chinese New Year

Happy Chinese New Year!

It's the year 4709 by the Chinese Calendar - the Year of the Dragon

Years ago, quilting daughter, Stephanie, discovered a batik that she fell in love with. It was a long, narrow dragon.

Given her creativity, it didn't take long for her to decide that she would add beads to the dragon's back and tail.

Once the beads were sewn on, she added borders. First a wide print fabric border that included most of the colors in the dragon.

The pink and white border is pieced triangles, and the outside is a solid dark blue. The binding on the wall hanging is the same as the middle border.

This top traveled with her from college in Los Angeles to an internship in Australia to a job in Boston, never mading it to China, yet this year it is perfect for the Year of the Dragon as it is currently displayed in her living room.

Stephanie's Dragon Quilt - the center is a batik image of a dragon.

Batik Fabric

And since we're talking about batik fabric, I thought I'd throw in a little history about batiks.

Even more than 2000 years ago, people were searching for fabric with a design. Eastern and Middle Eastern countries, including India, China, Japan, Persia and Egypt, developed a process for creating designs in fabric that is still being used today.

Artisans in Java and Indonesia further developed the process known as Batik to reflect the culture and religion of their countries in the richness of the colors and detail of the designs on their fabrics.

When I began quilting in the early 1980s, the variety of batiks available here in the U.S. was limited - both in color and design. The color selections were limited to royal blue and white or black and white.

A rare fabric shop that carried any batik fabric might have 4 bolts total with 3 different designs, and 2 different colors.

The design in the fabric on the left is a relatively complex design for an early batik here in the US. This fabric was purchased in the mid-1990s.

Understanding how a batik is made explains somewhat why the designs were fairly limited. The process is a method of creating a colored design on fabric by applying wax to the parts that are not to be dyed.

In a fabric with only white and another color, the waxing process is fairly simple - apply one design of wax, and then dye the fabric one color. Looking at the fabric above, wax would be applied to the fabric in the design that is white.

The fabric would then be dyed blue. After the fabric dried, the wax is removed, and the fabric is ready to sell. While the basic process remains the same, the number of steps increases as the number of colors increases.

As the demand for batiks increased, prices allowed for an expansion of creativity, and now batiks abound in quilt shops and online.

When I first began using batiks, I had a difficult time cutting them up - they seemed so valuable.

It didn't take long to get over that, though, since they are wonderful to work with - except that because of the tight weave, often they are difficult to hand quilt. They can even be a little more difficult to machine quilt, if you are doing some intricate machine quilting.

Using batik fabric in quilts can be done in many different ways. Batiks can be cut just like regular fabric and placed in patches throughout a quilt.

Often you can find batik pictures - like Stephanie's dragon or some smaller kitties I used for a quilt years ago.

Or, you can take a "picture" created on a batik, cut it up and insert separators, like the quilt you see below. You'll find more information here: Batik Panels

These are really interesting and fun fabrics, and usually are high quality. They are also available in jelly rolls or fat quarters. Hoffman has a fantastic selection that they get direct from Bali!