A New Venue For Best Of the Valley

This year the Best of the Valley Quilt Show moved from the Tulare Agri-Center just outside of Tulare, Ca to the McDermont Field House in Lindsay, Ca, which is about 15 miles west of the old site. If the name "Lindsay" sounds familiar, it's probably because you've opened a can of Lindsay olives or two. In fact, what is now the McDermont Field House was once packing sheds.
The show to go off without a hitch, due to the expertise of the staff who puts on the BOTV show each year. This year, Bobbie Moore turned over the reins to Suzanne Kistler, who seemed to handle her duties with grace and style.
Here are some photos of my booth at the show. (I'm in the hot pink sweater)

Kits are done

Thanks to my wonderful friends--Lynn Douglass, Eve Hall, and Christiane Marzi--the Mellow Yellow kits, plus two other kits are put together. We laughed through several days of cutting, folding, arranging, and packaging kits. These gals are incredibly creative. I just stood back and let them work their creative magic. Can't wait till we do it again, girls!

Mellow Yellow

Every time I say the name of this quilt and fabric collection, I cannot help but start humming the song "They call me mellow yellow . . . that's right." The quilt is designed, the fabric is in, and now I need to make a sample quilt. Boy is the fabric gorgeous--the yellow is truly yellow--like crayon yellow. For a free pattern, visit the Exclusively Quilters website. That will also take you to a link for the kit.

Okay, so I haven't posted in a while. But that's because I have been madly working on several projects. Finishing some, beginning others, and just letter some ideas percolate for a while. Here's how the butterfly wallhanging came out. Look for the pattern in a spring issue of The Quilter Magazine. I'll let you know the exact issue when I get word.

"Thrilled" is how I felt when I saw one of my quilts "Oak Leaves" in the latest edition of The Quilter Magazine. I designed it especially for a grouping of hand dyed fabrics I had been tinkering with for a while. Hand appliqueing the blocks and border took an even longer while, as did the quilting. This is one of those quilts I'm not going to part with for some time.

New Fabrics for Spring

One of the new spring lines, Urban Rhapsody, arrived recently and I've been busy working on some new designs. Here's what I'm planning to make. Let's see how it goes. You know how sometimes you get started on a project and then it seems to take on a life of its own . . .

Pandas

When Exclusively Quilters asked me to design a quilt using one of their new lines, Giant Pandas, I was somewhat apprehensive. The line featured a rather large panel of pandas, and I had never really made a "panel" quilt before. After tinkering with several designs on EQ6, I had a few things to send them--none of which I was very thrilled with. Neither were they. In the meantime, I had designed a much larger quilt than what they wanted, so I just said "what the heck" and sent off that larger quilt design. Well, sometimes, another set of eyes, another perspective, another designer can suggest just the thing to make a design work. A crop here. A shift there. A change in measurements. Voila! Magic! Giant Pandas is my first quilt design employing a panel.

And for those of you who may be interested in making a panda quilt of your own, I am currently taking pre-orders on the kits for this 40" x 48" wall hanging at my website nancyrinkdesigns.com.

By the way, thanks Deb, for all of your suggestions!