How do you like this guy? His name is "Dancing with Bats" and he is available at Interquilten. Come in to the shop and take a closer look at him.
Now that the shameless plug has been accomplished, I'll tell you about my grueling weekend.
It started out on Saturday with a quilt-a-thon to benefit QAC (pro. Quack) the Quilters Against Cancer. It's a Michigan based group geared toward raising money for women who have been diagnosed with breast cancer who do not have insurance. The quilt-a-thon was sponsored by Interquilten and was attended by members of three area quilting guilds. I got action shots of the cutting,
piecing
and ironing.
We managed to make at least a dozen quilt tops and over the next few weeks we intend to get them machine quilted and bound in order to send them off so they can be sold on the QAC website. I will keep you informed of when and how to bid on one of these quilts.
Sunday morning I rose early and met Tawni at her house in Interlochen. (For those of you who don't know, Tawni Gilmer is the owner of Interquilten which I guess makes her my boss, although she doesn't act like it. She treats me more like a valued friend whose opinion she respects. Go figure!)
Anyway, we drove down to Chicago for a little thing they like to call Fabriganza! The Troy Distributors opened up their warehouse and store owners were allowed to walk through and pick up whatever bolts they wanted. We were able to get some batiks as well as some Halloween panels that we had been out of for a long time. We'd had lots of fun cutting kits for these little Halloween panels and we had been out of them for some time. I'll get a picture of it and post it for all of you to see.
When we arrived it was a gorgeous cool sunny day. As you can see, the sky-line of Chicago is just lovely.
The Troy Warehouse is in a very nice neighborhood filled with these little brownstones. This one had a particularly lovely garden out front. There were a lot of Spanish signs in the window fronts, which was probably indicative of the local ethnic make-up.
We got in and started shopping. Periodically they announced a speaker and we went to hear three of them. The first two had fairly good talks on how to boost sales in the store through display and book support and other good ideas. But the third one, a young lady from a distributor of quilting books, was showing very creative ideas on embellishing and how to sell new idea type books. This is one of the quilts that she showed.
The idea of course is to have the display model up on the wall and in front of it have strips of fabric cut with the Triangles on a roll. The customers take the bundle of triangles home with them and sew them up and then they bring them back to trade with other triangles that you have in a bin in the store.
Interlochen is the home of a music academy as many of you know, so Tawni and I are always looking for musically oriented fabric and patterns. This quilt was on display also at Troy.
While we were in there the weather changed a little. It got warm and muggy and started to rain on and off. I still wanted to take a few pictures of the architecture in Chicago though.
We were planning on spending the night somewhere on the road but we stopped in South Haven for dinner and felt pretty good so we kept on going and got home by midnight. So in case anyone wants to know if you can make it to Chicago and back in one day, YOU CAN!
You're friendly neighborhood Haunter
Cindy K-K
