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Weekend Prequel

I am so looking forward to this weekend!! I have so many aspirations for getting things done. Most likely many of them will not happen, but it is so much fun to go into a weekend with such high hopes.

If you take time out of your weekend plans to read this little post, be sure to check out my giveaway post from a week or so ago and comment over there for a chance to win a Darcy pattern. The post is here. I will draw a winner on May 1.

You may also want to pop over to the store and check things out. May is our official Grand Opening month and all the items in the store are listed at 10% below retail, no coupons needed!!

http://www.DewberryLane.com

If you sign up for the newsletter while you are there you will also be entered into our monthly pattern giveaway. The first newsletter is one of my goals for the weekend, so that should be out sometime this coming week.

May will be a very busy month for giveaways for the store. To celebrate my Grand Opening, I am having giveaways and sponsoring sites in a few different places around the blogosphere. Be sure to keep an eye on my blog and I will point you in the right direction.

I hope all of you have a very fun and productive weekend!! Let me know what you’re doing if you care to share!

Happy Quilting!
Rachel

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Yay for Payment Options!

I just wanted to pop in a post real quick to let everyone know my store officially allows for credit cards now! To celebrate I am offering a 10% off coupon through Sunday. Just visit the store:

Dewberry Lane

And enter the code: blogity

Be sure to sign up for the store newsletter while you are over there to be sure you don’t miss any new items, giveaways, or sales! All newsletter subscribers are entered into a monthly pattern giveaway as well.

Happy Quilting!
Rachel

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MQX East

Last weekend I headed down to Rhode Island to take a class at MQX East. I was so excited to go that I woke up at 4:00 AM and couldn’t get back to sleep!! Luckily I didn’t wake hubby up until 5:00 AM, though I am not so sure he would call that lucky. This was my first time going to the MQX show, and the first time I have taken a class at any big show like this. I signed up for a hands on longarm class, and to say I was nervous would be an understatement. I had visions of me going into class and tripping on the first machine and knocking them all over one by one like a set of dominos. Now that would be classy, especially considering how sturdy these machines are. But if it could happen, I would probably be the one to do it. Luckily there was no tripping when I entered the class room. Just a lot of smiling faces. I signed up for this class hoping I could find some glimmer of hope that I might one day be able to sew something more than a nice looking meander on the machine that takes up half my basement. So I was pretty stoked when I learned something before the class even started. I learned that I have been putting my backings on the roller backwards!! This is how it *should* be done:

See how the backing is over the roller, well my backing has always been under the roller. Oooops ….. Luckily this didn’t affect the quilt or quilting itself, but every time I put a quilt on there I seriously wondered how in the world people do it. Nothing rolled smoothly and it took me longer to roll my quilt than it did to sew it!! Just for this reason alone, I am excited to get a new top on my machine. And of course I learned lots of new and wonderful things in the class that I cannot wait to try out!

After the class I headed over to the vendors to see what they had. When you go to a show like this, it’s easy to get distracted by all the shiny new toys, but my goal was to collect cards for products I thought would fit well in the store. I would like to have a tricked out longarm section, so this was a great chance to have a peek at some of the items available to longarmers. Of course I had to stop by the Superior Threads booth (who can resist all those pretty thread colors) to pick up some items for the store. I think I saw a lady giving me the eyeball as I was throwing things into my cart …. I’ll have one of these, two of these, one of these, oooh and three of these …… Good thing hubby wasn’t there, he *may* have had a heart attack. Pictures coming soon of my haul!! I already list a few tension gauges in the store, hopefully the rest will be up real soon.

After the vendor mall, I meandered over to the show quilts and let me say I may have cried a little tear of envy. These quilts were stunning!! However, I have to be honest here, there was only one quilt that moved me enough to haul out my camera and take some pictures. This quilt won second place in Art/Pictorial and was made by Cathy Wiggins. I will admit I *may* have an unhealthy obsession with Halloween, so this quilt was right up my alley.

This is a full shot of the whole thing. There was soooo much detail in this quilt.

Here is a shot of one of the witches and a bit of the background.

Here is the scroll, which was all hand embroidered. I believe it said it was about 250 hours spent on just this scroll.

The best part was the 3D quality of the quilt.

I wasn’t sure how I would like MQX, but it turned out to be well worth the drive down. I could see this becoming a yearly tradition.

Happy Quilting!
Rachel

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Back in Business

I thought this day would never actually come, but I am happy to say that my new store is finally (yes finally) up and running! For now we are only able to accept payment by PayPal, but we should have the ability to accept credit cards in about a week or two. There has been quite a bit of drama associated with getting this all set up (hence the delayed opening), but I was finally able to get everything right back to where I wanted it to be.

I will add some more posts in the coming weeks explaining some of the trials and successes I had in starting the store, but I wanted to pop a post up here to let all of you know that I have finally done it! And the one thing I couldn’t be more proud of is the fact that I did all of it myself. I have a friend that has an online store and she pointed me in the right direction, but the actual mechanics of building the site, adding inventory, setting up payments options …. those I did all by myself. And let me tell you, it was not easy (though I will admit I may have made it harder on myself than I needed to).

You can visit my little corner of the web here:

www.DewberryLane.com

I’d love to hear what you think of our product selection, navigation, visibility. Do you have suggestions for other products? We are still adding items we have in stock, but we are always looking for new items to add to our inventory as well.

If you visit my site and leave me a comment on this post letting me know what you think, you will be entered to win a Schnibbles pattern called Darcy:

A winner will be randomly picked from all eligible comments on May 1, 2011. Please be sure that you leave me a valid email so I can contact you if you win. If I do not hear from the winner within a week, a new winner will be picked.

I have also been working on a lot of quilts, and I even have a tutorial for you coming up. Be sure to keep an eye on this blog, as now that things are settled with my store, I plan on posting here much more often.

Happy Quilting!
Rachel