Weekly Update – Sept 17

I started the week feeling pretty down. When this happens, I’m never sure what the cause is. I try to just work through it, which usually works well enough for me. Finishing projects definitely helps. Performing successfully for an audience helped, too. I’m feeling much better as the week wraps up. Here is my weekly update for Sept 17.

Font

After a mis-fire during the uploading phase, I finally got my font together. That felt really good. If you are doing your own font, I found it easier to load the template into my iPad and just draw on it there. When I took a photo and tried to upload it, all of the guidelines came through, which would have taken hours to clean up. On the iPad it was super simple. Of course, then I had to figure out how to get it off of the iPad and onto my laptop, but I did it, and without any help from Google (or my husband)!

Tah dah! This felt like magic. It’s not fancy, but it is my handwriting.

A Project Finish!

I finished another long term project this week! My huge Kawandi is complete. I pushed myself to do the last little bit, so I could bring it along as part of my trunk show. It has already gotten so much love on social media – I’m blown away. I’ll be doing a reel to show it off better, along with a blog post. My next class session is up on the Gotham Quilts website, in October. Seats are already starting to fill up! Can’t make that date or time? Shoot me an email so I know you are interested. I’ll be in Florida from December to April this year, so I plan to do plenty of virtual hand stitching classes.

Trunk show!

The Ninigret Quilters were a fantastic audience on Wednesday night. They had me come up and present my trunk show. It was so much fun to have dinner with Sharon and Roberta, then do my schtick for the ladies. This was a big crowd for me – there were like 80 people staring at me! And, the microphone died when I touched it, as you would expect, so I had to yell. Good thing I know how to project my voice (thank you, toddler children.) Mom came and was a fantastic trunk show assistant. Now I’m really looking forward to my next show, in October at Rebecca’s Reel Quilters.

Creative Hand Stitching Journey

Wednesday night I led my monthly embroidery class through Gotham Quilts. It is always so much fun to see my people and do some stitch demos. This month we are doing beaded stitches! check out my beaded bird. I’m so glad Ivete and Andrea let me lead this journey. I certainly didn’t know how much I would enjoy embroidery when I agreed to teach it. Now I’m an embroidery enthusiast. I’ve had two new students sign up this month, too, which is fantastic.

AccuQuilt

My Rainbow Road quilt pattern and blog post are up on the AccuQuilt website, at long last. I love knowing what is going on behind the scenes, but it is so hard keeping secrets! AccuQuilt takes their secrets seriously, though, so I do, too. I’m always so excited when one of the projects is finally released! You can read the blog post here, if you missed it.

Leverage Update

This week I am working on social media. I’m trying to be a little more consistent, to get my stuff in front of more faces. To that end, I have gone through the hashtags listing in Module 1, highlighting the ones that apply to my work. I’m also going to set aside some time to research more quilting industry tags and build my own list of strong tags. I’m starting to pay a little more attention to which projects are popular, and which kinds of posts do really well. You will notice me putting up more reels, as Instagram gives them much more exposure. They are a bit of a hassle, but isn’t everything?

My next challenge is to learn how to set up a social media calendar and schedule program. Then, stick to it!

I also need to make some time to work on the design briefs. I’ve come up with an idea I like to keep my surface pattern work cohesive. Now I need to see if it will work.

Non-quilting

Let’s just pretend I’m whining about my college classes some more and actually skip that part. I’m still working, and not loving literary analysis. Poor Jen.

Mom and I worked on processing more than 50 lbs of tomatoes to make tomato sauce. This is an Italian thing we learned, and making the sauce from scratch is nice. I know all of the ingredients, and also get to use my fancy Kitchenaid mixer. We tried grilling to streamline the process, with mixed results. It takes forever and the tomatoes still need to be drained, but we didn’t add any water. So, it’s a toss up on whether boiling or roasting is better. With a beautiful day, absolutely, we will be roasting, and hanging out in the yard. This past weekend was wet and nasty, and Mom did not enjoy the outside time. Of course, there were no buckets of boiling tomatoes to drain, so that was a plus.

Oscar needed a bath. Not newsworthy, but look at how adorable he is, even when sad. And now he doesn’t smell like dead earthworms.

I hope you had a lovely week, and did more stitching than I did.