Happy New Year and new year's resolutions

Here's wishing everyone a Happy 2014. It certainly has come in with a bang where I live! We got 9-12 inches of snow and the temperature today is -4 degrees! I think the last time we had weather like this was in 1985 when we moved back to St. Louis. We were moving from North Carolina and the movers did not anticipate the cold weather. They had on light jackets and the chill factor that day was -10 (or more, I can't remember exactly how much, I just know that it was cold!) It sure looks pretty, but I'm glad I don't have to go out in it. Luckily my husband, Mike likes the cold weather and doesn't mind going out to feed our outside kitties that live in the garage!

I usually do not make new year's resolutions, but this year I decided that I need to to help make my business and website grow. I started by writing a newsletter and I sent out my first one a couple days ago. If you would like to receive it you can sign up on my Gateway Quilts Facebook page by clicking on the envelope. I will not be bombarding you with a lot of postings. Maybe a couple a month and when I have a special sale or merchandise come in. My second resolution is to post on my blog more often. (More than once a year!) I have to make a concerted effort to sit down and write at least once a week on things I am working on and any news that I would like to share.

I thought I would start this year with a compilation of all of the projects that I did last year. One of my first projects that I worked on was a quilt I designed for RJR fabrics. The fabric collection was called Dawn. It was a very nice collection of different types of textures and I wanted to make a quilt that showed off the textures. I designed this quilt pattern that I call Shattered because it reminded me of a shattered glass. These are two of the colorways. It was different from most of my quilt designs which were based on traditional quilt blocks. This certainly wasn't traditional!

It was designed with one simple block that was strip pieced, over sized and cut down to size. To create the design I had to move the fabrics around on the block and create three different versions of it to get the effect I wanted.

 I was asked, more recently, to make the quilt with another fabric collection from Kaufmann fabrics and it looks like this.

I have found that it looks neat in a variety of colors and textures, even Christmas. I would love to hear your opinions of it and what colorways you would like to see it in. You can find the pattern here: Shattered pattern.

I do have some wonderful news to share. I have been asked to teach at the AQS Show in Paducah, Kentucky this April. It is a dream come true for me! It is my favorite quilt show that I do not miss going to every year and I have been wanting to teach there ever since I started teaching nationally. I will be teaching my North Star, Yin and Yang, and Millefiori classes and lecturing on Using Mirrors to Create Unique and One-of-a-Kind quilts. If you want to know what those classes are, information is on my website about each one with images of the projects. I hope that some of you will be able to come to Paducah and take one of my classes or attend my lecture. As soon as the schedule is posted on AQS's website, I will post it.

Well, time to work on writing a pattern for one of my new designs (not my favorite activity, I'd rather be quilting). I hope this will be a good year for all of you. And as always, love what you do and do what you love. Toby