We Had A Guest

We had a guest last Thursday at our meeting, Marisa Simon, a Free Spirit Fabric representative and fellow quilter came to visit us and it was fantastic. Marisa’s job is to represent the Jaftex family of fabric companies, visiting local quilt shops and showcasing fabric lines from their designers for shop owners to order for their customers. While her job is to sell fabric, she’s also a quilter and so she gave us a trunk show of her quilts. What was really cool was her talking about her time spent with one of the coolest and most iconic designers of fabric, Kaffe Fasset. Kaffe is an artist and every piece of fabric he designs is painted by him. He is known for big, bold, color saturated prints His fabric is recognizable to all quilters. Here’s an example of a simple “brick” style quilt using only Kaffe Fasset prints. A true explosion of color!

He’s just one of the designers for Free Sprit Fabric. There’s the infamous Tula Pink, who quite literally has an army of obsessed quilters following her who’ve dubbed themselves the “Tula Troops”. And a personal favorite of mine for forever Anna Maria Horner, with a style similar to Kaffe. Gorgeous florals, her Echinacea line is a true masterpiece loved by so many they’ve recently reprinted them.

We were also treated to some samples of up and coming designers who’s work is also amazing. We absolutely loved listening to Marisa talk that the time went by too quickly

Many thanks to Marisa for a wonderful evening of quilts and inspiration. So many of us left that night vowing to cut up our large scale prints and let them sing in a quilt.

There was still a little regularly scheduled business to go over after that. Our block lotto continues to be popular amongst our members. For October we all made candy blocks and lucky Anne was the winner. How cute are these?

We’ve got lots of really good stuff happening in our ever growing guild. We’re incredibly fortunate to have our member, Deb H, , teaching us how to paint barn quilts. So much interest in this that we had to break up into two groups. Stay tuned for some pictures once everyone has had a chance to complete theirs!

We have a group quilt going to the International MQG quilting convention known as QuiltCon in February 2024. This one has been a true team effort and we are so excited to have it finished and displayed at the convention in Raleigh NC. When it returns to the Jersey Shore we will be auditioning local charitable organizations to donate it to for fundraising.

Speaking of shows, the JSMQG will be having its second quilt exhibit in February 2025 and it has an official name. “Journeys and Destinations“ an open ended interpretation of what journeys and destinations means to us. Cannot wait to see how each of us brings that to life.

A busy meeting so not much of our own work to show this month although we did manage to see a few things.