To Market We Go! Houston Recap & Giveaway!

To market, to market we go!  As always,  the Fall Quilt Market was held at the George R. Brown Convention Center in downtown Houston.   Except this market, someone came knocking early – yup – Hurricane Harvey crashed our quilty party a few months prior.  Many of us vendors and many more shop owners and attendees were concerned that either Houston would not recover or that the promoters of the Quilt Market would be forced to cancel.    Well, I’m happy to report that neither was true and Quilt Market went off without a hitch – and amazingly, there was no sight of any effect from Hurricane Harvey except for upbeat banners and artwork like this one throughout the city!  The downtown Houston area was lively and the convention center (which just completed a gorgeous 2 year revitalization) was perfect!  And added to this excitement, the Houston Astros were in the World Series!  This all made for a very exciting market to say the least!

We debuted 2 new patterns – Mini ModDog & Mini Spikey – and before you change that channel – make sure you leave a comment at the end of this blog and ask your friends to follow us and do the same to enter the giveaway!  Two lucky winners will win either a Mini Spikey fabric kit or a Mini ModDog fabric kit –  just leave your comment below and let us know which one you’d like and why.…ok – ‘nuf said…..anyway back to market……we debuted 2 new patterns – Mini ModDog and Mini Spikey – both are now available for purchase on our website!

We also attended our first ever Sample Spree selling already made Mini ModDog samples along with 6 Mini ModDog patterns – this way, shop owners have an already made sample and take it right back to their shop and start selling the patterns – nifty idea, right?!…Here’s Carl,  moments before the madness started.   Btw, the dog samples were a hit and the shop owners were thrilled to have an already made sample!  Below is a slideshow of all the Mini ModDogs samples we put together – we made 2-4 versions of all the styles you see – all in all, we estimated that we stitched up about 45 samples in the weeks prior to market – Wowwee!

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Of course, I needed to share these cute little pups with others too.  I also made a few for my friend, Jackie Kunkel at Canton Village Quilt Works to display in her booth –  using her new fabric collection, “Blue Moon” for Island Batiks.  This batik collection is super  gorgeous and so super saturated in all those blue, aqua, lavender and purple colours.  And of course, a play on the name – “Blue Moon”,  I couldn’t resist adding a moon behind one of the pups to make it extra super special for Jackie.  🙂 Jackie was so nice she even showed the Mini ModDog pillows to her schoolhouse attendees to generate more interest!

And spotted in another booth – Renaissance Ribbons had their very own Kaffe Fassett Mini ModDog too.  Renaissance Ribbons makes the most gorgeous ribbons and trims and since we embellish all of our Mini ModDogs with these trims so it only seemed quite natural that a pup pillow should be in their booth too!

And finally , we also designed and stitched up (with a lot of help from Teresa at Quilting is my Bliss and her extraordinary custom machine quilting) a grand total of 6 more quilts for Free Spirit Fabrics and 2 more quilts for Island Batiks. 

Free Spirit Fabrics always does a great job of displaying the new collections via their quilt gallery and this year they won the blue ribbon for best booth!  Yay! Super secret sewing was in full swing here at the Colourwerx Dezign Haus from early May onward – some of the fabric designers we had the honor of designing and making quilts for were:  Kaffe Fassett Collective, Tula Pink, Jenifer Paganalli,  and Corrine Haig.  Most of the quilts you’ll see here are now available as free PDF pattern downloads on Free Spirit’s website here.

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In addition to that, we also made large lap size versions of our Colourwerx patterns:  Spikey and Mix It Up! for our friends at Island Batiks in the their newest fabric collections debuting at market.  They displayed these in their booth – Take a look!

Whoo – time to rest?  Nah – we’re already planning our trip to Spring Market which will be in Portland…Yippee!

Anyway, thanks as always for following along with us!  And remember to leave a comment to enter the giveaway for a either a Mini ModDog fabric kit or Mini Spikey fabric kit! And be sure to ask a friend or two to do the same and leave a comment   Two winners will be randomly selected next Friday, November 17th!  Until your next colour fix – sew the rainbow and happy quilting!  L&C