Woohoo! After months of planning, Tanesha at CraftyGardenMom podcast and I are finally able to officially launch the
2013 Banned Books Week Challenge and Giveaway!
Post your Banned Books Week projects in our Flickr group anytime this week (September 22-28). Tanesha and I will be haunting the group and choosing winners at random throughout the week. We've each got a number of great prizes to give away so you really want to get in on the fun! (Need to remember what the challenge is? Click here.)
I'll have four winners myself--Thanks to C&T Publishing/Stash Books and Tanesha, I've got four books to give away! (One per winner, my choice).
Bright & Bold Cozy Modern Quilts, by Kim Schaefer, is her follow-up to her first book, Cozy Modern Quilts. All of the projects in the book are made up of just two shapes: squares and rectangles. They're simply put together but with beautiful results. There are 20 projects in this book: lap quilts (some quite sizeable!), wall quilts, table runners. This book is great for beginners and folks who have been around the quilt block awhile, alike! Great ways to bust your stash, or great excuses to pick up some new fabric.
Modern Mix by Jessica Levitt is 16 sewing projects (quilts, pillows, bags, and more) that combine solids and designer prints in beautiful ways. The book is divided up into sections based on how the solids are used: as background, in strips, as accents, and projects that only use solids. There is also a section with some design tips and, of course, basic sewing techniques. This book will definitely have you looking at your stash a little differently, or maybe planning on some stash enhancement.
A Month of Sundays: Family, Friends, Food & Quilts, by Cheryl Arkison is really an entire lifestyle book. It has 16 projects that are "pre-cut friends," as well as recipes and ideas for ways to relax with your family, friends, or just by yourself. The quilt designs are modern in sensibility, low-volume in color choices (although you could certainly adjust that to your own taste), and fairly simple to piece. There are plenty of other projects, such as little fabric flags, game surfaces, napkins, and other small projects meant for family fun time. This book fits right in with everything I've been saying about the Slow Quilt Movement!
And finally... QuiltEssential: A Visual Directory of Contemporary Patterns, Fabrics and Color, by Erin Burke Harris. I have a ton of quilt reference books on my shelves and still, boy-o, was I tempted to keep this one! Harris has put together a basic reference book with information about quilt math, types of fabrics, design elements, different quilt "genres," and techniques, interspersed with spotlight articles on some current modern quilt artists. The layout is extremely user-friendly, and the photos are both helpful and beautiful at the same time. If you're a beginner, you would definitely want to have this one on your shelf, I think; if you're a not-so-beginner, there may be pieces of information in here missing from your other reference books (like I found!). Great stuff.
So that's it! In order to be eligible for this giveaway, just include photos of your finished Banned Books Week Challenge projects in our Flickr group for the challenge, clearly labeled with "2013" somewhere in the title or description so we can keep them straight from last year's. Don't forget to include your artist's statement or a link to your blog where your artist's statement resides. Tanesha and I will be choosing winners through the week, including Monday, September 29th just to give you that one last Sunday evening to get yours posted. Don't forget to visit Tanesha's blog throughout the week to see her giveaways!
I'll be posting about my own challenge quilt later this week, as well as posting pictures of my local public library that's displaying our guild entries in this challenge during the week as part of their own Banned Books Week publicity. They may even show pictures of your quilts from the Flickr group!
Looking forward to seeing your entries, and good luck on the giveaway!