The Hottie Hotseat Flames Up with Designer/Author/Teacher Triple Threat Anne Wiens!

The purpose of the Hottie Hotseat is really just to get to know the quilt professionals featured in a more personal way. Each featured hottie is given a list of 20 questions and asked to choose five to answer.  

  

Please join me in welcoming the February 2014 Hotseater, Anne Wiens, Owner of Sweetgrass Creative Designs! 

Anne is also the author of "The Thrifty Quilter," a must for every scrap quilter, and was a member of the 2013 Quiltmaker Magazine Scrap Squad. But she's certainly about way more than scraps. Enjoy!

 Location: Shelby, Montana

# Years in Business: 8

Current Quilt project: I'm working on the prototype for my annual WorldWide Quilters Day retreat. This will be the 15th annual 1-day event, and each year I design a twin-size quilt. If the ladies come with their material cut, they can complete the quilt top in under 8 hours. We have breakfast and lunch catered, and there's a bowl of M&M's on each table, so the only thing that slows us down is the occasional empty bobbin. (Pictured on left.)

   

 Question 1:What is the furthest shop you have ever visited from your home?

Answer: That would probably be The Great American Quilt Factory in Denver. Now, I started quilting in 1973, and back then you  never heard of a whole fabric shop just for quilters, so this place became something of a "holy city", and I knew that someday I must make the pilgrimage. It happened on a shop hop during the first  McCall's Quilt Symposium, and it was like quilter's heaven and quilter's hell all at once. If you can imagine...they loaded 45 quilters on a bus, dropped us off at the front door, and said "Be back on the bus in 45 minutes." A feeding frenzy is the only way to describe it. Would you go back? We did go back during another Symposium, and they did give us more time. Sadly, the store closed a few years ago.

 

Question 2: What is the nerdiest thing about you?

 

Anne's idea of a perfect afternoon?

Answer: I love puzzles..and I use that word in it's broadest sense. Crosswords, sudoku, jigsaw, I love them all. Rubic's Cube? I spent days solving it...then I took it apart to see just how it worked.  My mother knits, and if her yarn became tangled, I was the kid who would sit for an hour and untangle it. I was also the kid who had to take every broken gadget or appliance apart to see how it worked. (Mom's only rule....you can fix it, but you will not plug it in!") I recently purchased a totally trashed Singer Featherweight sewing machine for a song because I want to rebuild it. Don't tell Mom. The puzzle is part of what I love best about quilting.  I love looking at a quilt and figuring out how it was put together.

Question 3: How many UFOs are in your pile? How many do you honestly believe you might finish someday?

Answer: Too many. I stopped counting at 24. A lot of my UFO's are class samples and sometimes it's easier to pack those around as tops rather than completed quilts. A lot of my UFO's are projects from the classes I take. Often, I'm not crazy about the project itself, but I'm there to learn the process...again, it's the puzzle.

Question 3A: How many completed quilts are there in your home?
Answer: I was just asking myself that a couple of nights ago. The answer is, I don't know. But it was a bitterly cold night and I live in a very old house, so when it's -24, it can be a challenge to keep the place comfortable. Anyway, I was tucked in bed, under the one quilt I actually use, but I just could not get warm. Finally, it occurred to me..."I'm a quilt designer for pity's sake. Those samples in the other room are quilts." I went and grabbed one, put it on the bed and slept toasty warm, dreaming of the obituary headline I had narrowly escaped: "Local Quilt Designer Freezes to Death. Stack of Unused Quilts Found Nearby."

 Question 4: What is the ugliest fabric in your stash?

I think it's the pink background that makes it weird.

Proof that any fabric can make a nice quilt!

Answer: Okay, first of all, I'm expanding the definition of "my stash" to include all of the fabrics I know to be in stock at my local quilt shops. Occasionally, there will be a bolt that just makes me lie awake at night wondering what was the designer thinking?  It taunts me every time I walk in the shop until I just have to use it. (There's that puzzle thing again.) Here is one case in point: a Martha Negley print.  Meaning no offense to Martha, this is as close to "ugly" as a fabric can get.  I finally decided that the only way to deal with a print this "loud" was to "shout it down" with something even louder, in this case, the combination of burgundy, orange and lime green. The pattern is my "Right Angles". Link: www.quiltwoman.com/patterns/right-angles-quilt-pattern-aw-014/

Question 5:  Three things on your quilting bucket list
Answer:  This one was a lot harder than I thought it would be!
1.To publish another book
2. To teach at a "big time" event like Road to California or Quilt Colorado.
3. To attend the International Quilt Festival in Houston and Quilt Week in Paducah.

 And one last quilt we want to share, designed by Anne for this year's SuperSew Sunday at her local shop. 

"On Super Bowl Sunday, my local shop, the Creative Needle, hosts a special event called "Super Sew Sunday". We demo new tools and techniques. This year my demonstration was on Marti Michell's new "Sashing Star Set" of rotary cutting templates. I designed the green and orange quilt to show the four stars the tool makes. I had planned to do a scrap quilt, but couldn't resist using the navy and orange of the Denver Broncos and the navy and lime of the Seattle Seahawks. It's probably too much to ask that in the future, all SuperBowl contenders have team colors that coordinate."

 Yes, sadly, that probably isn't something we quilters can control, but I for one love what Anne was able to do with the team colors this year!

Thank you, Anne, for bravely risking the flames and taking a turn in the hotseat! 

"And More!" - Quiltmaker 100 Blogs blog tour

 

Volume #8 of QM's 100 Blocks hits the stands next week, and we're celebrating with a blog tour! If you haven't been touring around cyberspace yet for a preview of many of the blocks, head on over to Quiltmaker's blog for all the details - and prizes. As if a visit here to Quilting Hottie Haven weren't prize enough.

While this volume does indeed feature lots of blocks "from today's top designers" as promised on the cover, I am very much aware that I personally am firmly in the "And More!" crowd. It's really terribly exciting to be hanging with the cool kids, though! Fingers crossed they invite me to sit at their lunch table.

One of my very favorite moments at Spring Market was when Carolyn Beam, QM Editor, wandered  into my booth and handed me the 100 Blocks entry form. I'd considered entering in the past but in all honesty had been too distracted (read: kinda too lazy) to locate the form. Now that it had been handed to me by the big guns I had no excuse.

Fabrics look familiar?

By some miracle, I didn't lose the form between Portland and home, and submitted "Hidden Garden," so named because I had just read "The Forgotten Garden" and the design certainly looks like my mind was still in a walled English garden. Lo and behold it became block #781.

I am absolutely amazed by the quality of the photo they took of my block. Clearly they have a fancier camera over there at  Quiltmaker than the one in my iphone. To see my block in shiny glossy splendor sandwiched between offerings from The Quilt Company and Jaybird Quilts (so very much NOT "and mores") is a little thrill every time I turn to page 65.

Those who know my "fun over fuss" style of design might be surprised to see so many points to match. Eh. There aren't as many as you think. Or maybe there are and you'll just have to give it a try and find out if I am turning over a new leaf or if maybe I just got distracted by the pretty fabrics. (Hint: It's the latter.) Loved these fabrics and they screamed "Garden!" to me. I told them to use an inside voice and we got creative together.

I played around with the block a lot this summer, and as I am wont to do, changed it up a little here and there to show what you can do with both the actual block as seen in 100 Blocks and with a few minor changes.

Set it with sashing in two solids from your color palette:

You might want to fill in that one sashing square I left blank. Just saying.

Try two different solids with the same prints:

Make nine of these blocks and you'd have a sweet little baby quilt. For a girl. I've heard boy babies don't love florals and hot pinks.

Change up the outer solid border to a scrappy one in prints rather than a solid for a truly scrappy runner:

Well, it will be a runner when it is bordered, quilted, and bound, but you get the idea.

Leave off the outer solid entirely and you get a cool new secondary design, as in this quilt I sewed my face off on all Labor Day weekend to get it submitted by the deadline, and woo hoo! it made it into the Designer's Gallery! Thank God, and thank Carolyn for putting it in, as I used it as an excuse to get out of all childcare responsibilities over the long weekend, and if it hadn't been included I couldn't have pulled that excuse in the future.

Those familiar with my style recognize this quilt as more my thing. Even one of my 10 year olds saw this and said "Uh, Mom? That's just Kickin' Stash." Well, no. It isn't, actually, although it is unwittingly similar and apparently I have a type in quilt block love as well as in men. Circular-ish scrappy in blocks, left-handed and studly in men, for those keeping track of such things.
 
My favorite part of this design send-up is the four patch cornerstones in the border. Simple but fitting. Isn't it delightful when we amaze ourselves with our design choices?


And how fun to find my block among those used in the Block Tester's Gallery of Volume 8 as well, this time with a totally different coloration and set on point in the borders of a quilt by Shannon Ownby. If there is anything I shake my head at in quilting, it is the thought that a block can only be made in the colors and/or fabrics shown in the photo, and I absolutely love that a tester saw my block in a completely different way than I did and made it work in her design. Thanks to my friend and fellow contributor Anne Weins, who pointed this extra block sighting in Volume 8 out to me. Bonus excitement!

I hope you enjoy all of the blocks and blogs on this tour. Quiltmaker is graciously giving away a copy of the magazine to a winner from each participating blog, and I invite you to enter while you are here. Just leave me a comment telling me what your current quilt project is - I know, I know, you have 47 projects going on now, just pick your favorite - and you are entered to win. I'd love if you considered following me here at QHH for fun and quilty snarkiness on a semi-regular basis, but that is not required for entry.

AND

For a second entry, head on over to my EPQD facebook page and leave a comment on the post that links to this blog post. I'll send one winner a signed copy of 100 Blocks. Because my "and more" signature will surely up the value on Ebay, right?

Both entries will be drawn at 10:30pm EST (or is it EDT? I never know what we are in at whatever time of year, but Eastern Time) Sunday November 17. Be sure you leave me a way to find you, like an email. I've had no luck with smoke signals in the past.

Thanks for stopping by and I hope to see you back soon!