March Spotlight: Art Gallery Fabrics

March is only a few days, and I have some serious spring fever right now! I changed out a bunch of the greenery in my house yesterday for blooms, am working on a spring table runner, and am eagerly looking forward to the day I can pack away all the Winter Gear for a few months.

At the shop there is a large amount of fresh new fabric that give off some springtime vibes!

 In our shop we love to work with full fabric collections, and this is also how our shop is setup, everything is displayed as a designer collection of fabric, even our blender fabrics our organized like this. We do this for a couple reasons. 

1. The designers go through a lot of work putting the collections together as well as marketing it on social media

2. It takes a lot of work out of the fabric pulling process, all the pieces in that collection were designed to work together and will look fantastic in a project

To get to know the various fabric companies and the designers better we will be doing a special focus on a few different fabric companies and their designers. For the month of March we will focus on Art Gallery Fabrics.

Art Gallery Fabrics is a company that started up in 2004 with a goal to bring a chic and modern perspective into the quilting world. The quality of these fabrics is consistently excellent making them beautiful to work with. Art Gallery has beautiful collections that range from quirky, bright and fun to soft and sweet, to earthy  natural prints and colors. Their collection of basics go from solids, to near solids to some with a large print, and they blend wonderfully with the collections. 

We have William, our fabric rep for Art Gallery, coming in to the shop on March 12 to do 2 presentations on the fabric. One presentation will be in the afternoon, the other in the evening, and both of them will be the same, so just attend whichever one works best for your schedule. At the presentations there will some giveaways and a door prize. Everyone that attends the presentation will be given 20% off their Art Gallery purchases on the day of the event.
You can sign up for the presentation here

There will be some more fun little flash events happening through out the month, so be sure to stop in the store to check those out, and feel the difference in the Art Gallery Cottons.

On the blog here, I hope to do a couple designer spotlights throughout the month of March to share with you a little history on some of the talented designers that work for Art Gallery as well as where they get their inspiration from.


Have you worked with Art Gallery Fabrics before?
Kayla

Aurifil Presentation

As all of you know by now I'm sure, we at Chicken Feed Quilts love our Aurifil Thread! The strength, consistency, and quality in each spool is unbeatable in our opinions, and with 5 different weights it works for each project that we are working on, from handwork to standard piecing to top stitching. 

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In just over a month the President of Aurifil and their Director of Marketing are coming to our store to do a presentation on Aurifil Thread. The company is based in Italy, so this is no small trip for them, and we are thrilled that they have agreed to do two presentations in our Shop. The presentation is an hour and a half long and will be filled with information about Aurifil. There will also be goodies from the company handed out, and from previous experience I know that they give out pretty amazing gifts. For everyone that joined our Aurifil Thread Club at the beginning of the year there will be an extra gift.

Esther, Carrie and I will be attending a special presentation for quilt shop owners on October 1 and we are super excited to hear about whats new in their company and what their plans are for the future.  

As for the future of Aurifil at Chicken Feed Quilts, our third stand for thread is on order and should be in our store next week sometime. The plan is to fill this one with the small spools in a wide variety of color shades. These small spools are great for when you need the thread color to match your project. I mainly use it for top stitching bags and applique. 

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We also hope to bring in more of the designer boxes. These boxes come in two sizes and contain either 10 small spools or 12 large ones in the main colors that the designer uses and coordinate with their fabric at a lower cost than it would be to buy all the spools individually. 

Seats for the presentation have been filling very quickly, and we can only fit so many so if you want to learn more about Aurifil call the store or come on in to reserve your seat. There is a $5 fee for each seat, this will be returned to you as Chicken Feed Cash when you show up for the event, if you have reserved a seat and do not come you will forfeit your $5. 

We will be closed on Monday, September 3rd for Labor Day. Our weekend plans are two family dinners, one with each side of the family which we do every weekend, a BBQ with friends, a trip to the Farmer's Market and an outing to the Corn Maze. On Tuesday I will be sending two of my boys off to school. Do you have any plans for the weekend?

Kayla

Batik Presentation Recap

This past Wednesday we had a total of 60 ladies come to Chicken Feed Quilts for a presentation on Hoffman Batiks.

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During the presentation Rob gave us a little bit of history into how Rube Hoffman started Hoffman Fabrics, and how his two sons expanded the company and also added batiks. He explained the difference between quilting cottons, and batiks, mainly that batiks have a tighter weave, are dyed, that they are preshrunk, do not fray, and are all done by hand.

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We were also told about how Hoffman has installed a water treatment facility in their factory in Bali which filters and tests all water that was used in the extensive process, before they send it back out into the rivers. He also told of us how the designers and the craftsman work together to bring forth the beautiful fabrics.

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Not only does Hoffman make the classic Batiks they have also brought out a modern line of batiks. These fabrics are made using the same quality of materials and craftsmanship, but just skip the step that gives the mottled colors. They also have started producing digital prints, which have been very popular at our store.

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After Rob gave us all this information he had a small trunk show for us, he had several samples from Hoffman, as well as the ones the the staff at Chicken Feed Quilts have made. 

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 At the end of the show all the ladies were given a roll of fabric, a free pattern, and a challenge: to make something with Hoffman batiks and the free pattern and to bring it in store for judging between June 15 and July 1. The winner will receive a basket of goodies courtesy of Hoffman California!

To cap off the event everyone was given the opportunity to do some shopping!

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Thank you to all who were able to make it out to the event, and to Rob from Trendtex for all the information, displays of beautiful fabrics and quilts, as well as for the prizes and gifts!

For all those who were not able to attend, we do hope to do another session in the fall. 

Every week at Chicken Feed Quilts we have a different unadvertised special. Some of our previous ones have included sales on flannels and specific collections of fabric, buy one get one 50% off books, patterns, precuts, gift cards and draw entries. Next week Esther is going on a vacation and leaving me in charge, so in addition to our unadvertised special we will be having daily deals!

Come in store to see what these specials are, and also to see all the new fabrics. We have received shipping confirmations from four different companies today, so there will be lots of new fabrics and notions to check out next week!

Kayla