Our News

Because of preparations for a lovely wedding in our family, it was not possible to finish reconstructing our web site. My apologies for any inconvenience caused and my thanks for your patience. It will be made ready just as soon as possible.

I hope you enjoy this issue, and remember, I like hearing from you.

Maria

Quilt Sites

Quilters News Network (QNN)

By now, every quilter in the world must know about, love, and watch QNN. Just in case you are one of those who has not heard the news, I am very pleased to present it to you here!

QNN provides television quilting shows to watch, right on our own computers! They are available 24 hours a day, 7 days a week - a quilter's dream come true! Watch such well-known quilters as Kaye Wood, Fons and Porter, Eleanor Burns, Jodie Davis, and more, including our very own featured quilter, Linda Franz. Be sure to look for the free patterns provided by these quilters!

Some quilters have had problems viewing the shows. If you happen to be one of them, be sure to click on the Need Help? link on the bottom, right hand side of the window. I am one of those who could not view the shows at first. In my case, it was necessary to change the settings in my firewall software to accept pop-ups. Having done that, the shows suddenly appeared. I then set my firewall to block pop-ups again, which did not interfere with further viewing.

Enjoy QNN!

Logo Votes

In an earlier issue, we asked readers to vote on the logo they liked best, our original, which is a photograph of Michael's work, or the newer version, which is a graphic image of that same work. Incredibly, the voting tally was 50% for the older version and 50% for the newer version leaving us undecided as which to use! I left the decision to Michael since the design is his. He chose the newer version for the Web, so that is what we will use from now on.

Again, a special thank you to everyone who took the time to vote and to send in their many, wonderful comments.

Featured Quilter - Linda Franz

Meet Linda Franz, award-winning Canadian quilter, quilt designer, writer, publisher, producer, expert in hand piecing and quilting, teacher, and one of the newest stars on QNN.

An old, tattered, dark, patchwork quilt, made of small, triangular patches was the only quilt in Linda’s childhood. She remembers being simply delighted when it was replaced with a new, pink chenille bedspread, which likely came from Eaton's department store.

Linda recalls, “Before we were old enough to go to kindergarten, my mother taught each of us girls how to sew, knit, and use her Singer sewing machine, but no one in our family quilted. I did not consider quilting until many years later.”

In 1993, she went into Jillybean’s in Oakville, Ontario, Canada to buy some greeting cards. (Jillybeans is now a wonderful quilt shop, but at the time, it was primarily a gift shop). She spotted an ad for a lap quilting class, and on a whim, signed up for it.

quilting, however, sounded reasonable. I did not even know enough to ask what the quilt would look like! At the time, I was more interested in the technique than the finished product,” explains Linda. She enjoyed the series of classes and did finish the sampler quilt.

Linda did not get hooked on quilting until she made friends with quilter Mary Althaus in Florida. Her neighbours there told her about a friend who was a magnificent quilter, lived to quilt, quilted every day, had a room full of fabric called a "stash," visited a place called Paducah every year for a big quilt show, and travelled to take classes from famous teachers. Linda states, “I resisted, but eventually they introduced me to Mary and we have been friends ever since. So, truly, the best thing about my first sampler wall hanging is that it led to my friendship with Mary. Or, as my husband Russ likes to joke, “It's all her fault!” 

Mary took Linda to her first guild meeting in Naples, Florida, where she remains a member. She introduced Linda to Lady's Circle Patchwork Quilts magazines, Baltimore Album appliqué techniques, the concept of a stash, and the Dear Jane Quilt. In 1998, Mary was intent on making a reproduction of Jane Stickle's 1863 Civil War Quilt, In War Time using the patterns in the book by Brenda Papadakis. Linda explains, “I was not interested in reproduction fabrics or in copying, or in making a bed quilt, or even in joining an Internet quilting group, but Mary was a very good friend so I agreed to make a few small blocks for the front of a blouse, by hand, because that was the way Mary was doing it. At the time, I did not understand how addictive little blocks and the Internet can be!”

Linda has never liked following sewing, knitting, or quilting patterns, and has always made changes to them. She likes to personalize every project and be unique. Her first intense involvement with quilters was online with Dear Jane, where most members were trying to make exact replicas of the Jane Stickle quilt. Linda did not consider making a replica. She enjoyed making all of the blocks but with extra and creative changes of her own. She did not use reproduction fabrics. She used only only two fabric colours, turned all of her blocks on point, and used a 12 block x 12 block setting instead of a 13 x 13. This makes her Dear Jane quilt, In Time of Friendship look so different that many people do not recognize it as one. It was Linda's first bed quilt.

Detail of Love and Friendship

After making her Dear Jane quilt, Linda was hooked on small blocks and hand piecing so decided to design her own. “Squares were pretty well covered, so, inspired by the Jane Austen Quilt, I switched to diamonds. In some ways, it seemed ‘meant to be’ because it combines my loves: quilting, Jane Austen, photography, designing, and writing!”

Winning national recognition for her quilts, gave Linda confidence in her abilities and techniques. Her quilt, In Time of Friendship won Best in Show at the Vermont Quilt Festival in 1999, and a First Place ribbon from AQS in Paducah in 2000, in addition to several ribbons in the guild show in Naples, Florida.  Love & Friendship, her second large quilt, which she named after a novel Jane Austen wrote at fourteen, won a first place ribbon at the Vermont Quilt Festival in 2001, and was juried into Paducah and Houston.

Linda has had decades of experience with sewing machines, and although she still likes doing some things by machine, she prefers sewing by hand. She finds it much more relaxing, enjoys the precision of hand piecing, and
the portability as well. She says, “Thanks to freezer paper, I can easily

design anything I want with no math or complicated templates. My
sidekick, Monkey, has become a Hand Piecing Snob. He even lists his
top ten reasons for hand piecing on my web site! Hand piecing is very simple and satisfying, and Monkey gets a lot of fan mail about it!”

“Monkey became my little sidekick quite by accident. He is very photogenic and can say and do things I cannot. He can even take an extreme position on the advantages of hand piecing and has his own e-mail address.”

Monkey keeps up an active correspondence, sometimes even with the grandchildren of Quilted Diamonds quilters. It can start out very simply with, “Hi Monkey, I'm 5 years old. Do you have pictures of yourself on a train? I like monkeys. Bye.”

Monkey always writes back, and sometimes an online relationship carries on for many months. And yes, Linda did borrow a train and took a series of photos especially for this delightful pen pal!

Linda loves the interaction with quilters online. Within a few months of getting an e-mail address, she was experimenting with a software program called PhotoPoint along with simple web site software to illustrate her messages. It was fun for her to take photos of her quilt blocks while they were under construction and to include her little Monkey in the shots. She even began photographing the backs of her squares and diamonds so that quilters could see the options for pressing hand pieced blocks. The feedback Linda received was wonderfully satisfying. One thing led to another and she now has a website with more than 100 pages she creates and maintains herself.

Linda has been teaching and giving hand piecing workshops for the past three years. Her first teaching experience was at the AQS (American Quilter’s Society) in Paducah in 2002. She was surprised at both how much she enjoyed teaching there and how enthusiastically quilters responded to her logical, organized, step-by-step approach. Her students nominated her for The Professional Quilter Magazine's 2004 Teacher of the Year.

Linda has taught for many guilds in Ontario, Texas, Delaware, Massachusetts, Michigan, New York, Florida, and more. She now limits herself to guilds within 600 miles of Naples, Florida during the winter seasons, and Burlington, Ontario during the spring and summer seasons. She is making one exception. She will be teaching in September for the La Conner Museum in Washington State at the beginning of a three month exhibit of Dear Jane and Quilted Diamonds quilts.

Linda enjoys presenting Jane Austen, Jane Stickle & Friends to Quilt Guilds. The small changes she makes to each beforehand ensures that every presentation is unique. She starts with a trunk show, and then proceeds with more than 350 slides using her own multi-media projector. She combines all of her above-mentioned loves, and through her photos, takes quilters on a journey to England where they can see a quilt at Jane Austen's house in Hampshire, then on to rural Vermont to see a quilt made during the Civil War, and then launches into cyberspace to demonstrate the way those quilts influenced her and her cyberspace friends.

When asked to share an interesting experience with us, Linda told the following story.

“One of the most amazing experiences I have had as a quilter/author/teacher was taping my episode of Simply Quilts with Alex Anderson. It was June 2002, only three months after I published my first book. Writing the script to stay inside strict time limits was a challenge. I truly enjoyed working with the producer, and meeting Alex, but it is high pressure! Most people do not realize how many rules there are. I could not mention my book, the season, or the time of day. I could not look anywhere except at what I was doing or at Alex. No looking into the camera, no Monkey on the table, and so on.”

“Most people do not realize that an episode of Simply Quilts is done all in one take. As soon as it was over, my mind went blank and I was sure I had forgotten to say several important things. I waited on pins and needles (pun intended) for 9 months until my episode aired for the first time and was relieved to find I had said all the things I thought I had forgotten!”

Preparing for Simply Quilts along with the tremendous response to it which she received, inspired Linda to write and produce her own two hour hand piecing lesson on DVD for her second book.  She was the Executive Producer and therefore able to set her own rules. Monkey was given a starring role. 

Recently, Linda began teaching her Quilted Diamonds 2 lessons to quilters worldwide without even having to leave home. She does this through the new Quilters News Network every Sunday morning. Since her shows have aired, Linda has been thrilled to hear from hand piecers and hand piecing "wannabees" from all over the world. In addition to Canada and the United States, she has been contacted by quilters in Spain, Italy, Belgium, Holland, Norway, Sweden, Finland, Denmark, Turkey, Israel, France, Germany, Austria, Nigeria, South Africa, England, Ireland, Wales, Scotland, Brazil, Peru, Japan, China, Bali, Australia, and New Zealand! Quilted Diamonds and hand piecing are now being enjoyed everywhere.

Here is what some of them have to say.

I have long lamented that I wasn't able to work on my quilting during my lunch hour.  I read a lot during lunch but that has gotten old, especially since I have projects that I would like to work on!!  After watching the lesson, I realized that here was the perfect solution ....... and it looks SO relaxing! 

I am new to quilting......... My local quilt shop does not offer anything using hand piecing ,they wouldn't even let me attend a beginning piecing class without a machine, so I had to buy some hand piecing books and there just aren't many available at my local quilt shop. Oh how I wish your program on QNN  had been available then.  This is the most informative program on hand piecing I have ever seen. You are amazing and an excellent teacher! I just can't wait to buy EQ and the Quilted Diamonds books and CD.

I might have to start hand piecing now.  . . . It's relaxing, I don't have to concentrate much and can watch TV while I'm doing it.

I saw your program this morning on QNN, and my heart is beating so fast!!!
I started over 11 years ago as a hand piecer, but was told by so many people that it was archaic.

You have opened up a whole new area for me.  . . .
I usually read on my lunch hour, but this would be a lot more productive. 
You made it look soooo simple ...nothing to fear, at all.

I am a machine quillter but also enjoy hand quilting. Your show was very
helpful as I am self taught and didn't know some of the things you showed us.

Click here for page 2 of this newsletter, for quilt book reviews, questions and answers, free pattern winners, and more.

To contact Maria Michaels Designs click here.

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