mary fons color me quilter Archives

28 Apr 2015

Color Me Quilter is Tomorrow @ 1PM EST!

by Mary | posted in: Quilting, Work | 0

This quilt is for sale from Rocky Mountain Quilts. It's a Log Cabin Maltese Cross from Pennsylvania, c.1880 62 x 68. ($4,600) This quilt is for sale from Rocky Mountain Quilts. It's a Log Cabin Maltese Cross from Pennsylvania, c.1880 62 x 68. ($4,600) — This quilt is for sale from Rocky Mountain Quilts for $4,600. Log Cabin Maltese Cross from Pennsylvania, c.1880 62 x 68.

Since June of last year, I’ve been doing my Color Me Quilter webinar series. The enjoyable, informative, quilt geeky show happens once a month and helps you select fabric for your quilts. Many, many quilters have asked me for help in this area, and Color Me Quilter has helped a lot of you, which feels great.

There are just two months left of the series, though you can get bundles of my past webinars on the Fons & Porter website. Tomorrow, my presentation examines brown fabrics. I know, I know — brown does not scream “sexy.” It may not scream “modern” to you, either; by “modern” I mean “relevant,” not necessarily “modern” the way quilters use it — but modern quilters are using brown a lot these days, actually. I can pretty much guarantee you will be surprised, big-time at what you see tomorrow.

From Civil War quilts and their mega-popular reproductions to classic Amish quilts; from brilliant use of brown by today’s designers, such as Edyta Sitar to Amy Ellis; from timeless combos like traditional brown and pink to chic brown and black, you will be inspired and provoked to think about your own fabric palette and how brown plays a role.

Brown isn’t the new black, y’all: it’s the new brown.

It’s easy to join. Just go to the Webinar tab on my homepage and I’ll see you at 1PM EST tomorrow.

30 Sep 2014

Tonight, Get Yellow.

by Mary | posted in: Quilting, Work | 0

Antique quilt or ray of sunshine? Hard to say.

Tonight, I cast aside this mortal coil and share the love of quilts for an hour. It seems fitting that tonight’s Color Me Quilter webinar considers yellow. Sunshine, lemon meringue pie, a banana peel pratfall — yellow is key in all this joy. Yellow reaches a long, golden arm into the history of the American quilt, too; from calico to Chrome, quilts show plenty of yellow through the ages.

Putting this lecture together over the past few weeks has been a refuge for me, in fact. It’s hard not to be cheerful when you’re looking at quilt after sunshiney quilt. And tonight, live from Chicago, you can join me online for the talk and I’ll share with you how to harness the power of yellow in your own work. We’ll talk contrast and hue and how best to “push” yellow in one direction or another. I will also offer a bonus lesson in substrates and you’ll see so many quilts, you’ll probably run to your machine to sew when we’re done.

The show begins at 7pm CST. If you’d like to join the party, click here and wear your best Big Bird costume. No one will see you in it, but we’ll feel it.

2 Aug 2014

New York: Where Your Twin Has Been Living Since 1985.

by Mary | posted in: Day In The Life, New York City | 0

Woman on subway, NYC 1973. Photo: Erik Calonius, US National Archives.

My Big Apple bedazzlement continues.

In 2013, the Census Bureau reported 8,405,837 million people living in New York City. If nothing about that number has changed except that me and Yuri moved here, it’s now 8,405,839. If you count my sock monkey in the number, which you should, we can get to a nicer, roundish number of 8,405,840. I’m confident Yuri, Pendennis, and moi are not the only changes to the New York City population since last year, but this is why its funny.

All of these people. There’s one of everything.

I play a little game when I’m out and about. When I see someone totally one-of-a-kind, or outlandish, or remarkable in any way (and everyone is remarkable in some way) I note their characteristics and then try to imagine imagining them. Like:

“Could there be on this earth, at this moment, a person who is a nun, around fifty years old with pink socks, a guitar, and a suitcase with a Grateful Dead sticker on it? Could that person possibly exist in this wide, wide world?”

Then I answer myself that yes, there could plausibly be such a person because in that moment when I’m asking myself, that means I am looking at a person who matches that exact description. The nun was standing in front of Penn Station the other day, waiting for a bus, I assume. Then I play some more.

“Does a person exist who has a spiderweb tattooed on his face and wears corrective shoes?”

Yes, this person lives on my block. Yuri and I call him “Spiderman” and he is frightening to behold. He is acutely homeless.

“Could there be a 4’5 Asian-American girl with a panda backpack and a tattoo of a Pac Man ghost that covers her entire leg, who is screaming at her boyfriend that she wanted peanut butter froyo, not caramel froyo, dammit Reggie????”

Yes, that argument happened about an hour ago out on St. Mark’s Place.

“Is there a male model whose girlfriend is also a model, and are they both wearing large hats and are they both wearing all denim, and are they both Serbian?”

Yep, and yep. Just another piece of the crowd on any given day.

And consider what you’re wearing. Right now, look at your outfit. Someone in New York has that exact thing on, I’m telling you. I can’t say I’ve seen them in it because of course, I can’t see you in it. But someone has it on. They might even share your name.

There’s only one you, but New York gives that concept a run for its money.

25 Jun 2014

Color Me Quilter: A Webinar You Will Like

by Mary | posted in: Work | 11

One many slides from the show. Visit the “Booking” page on my homepage to sign up. It will be fun + informative.

On Monday, something unique and (hopefully) extremely awesome is happening from 1-2pm, EST: the first live, online webinar in the Color Me Quilter series is taking place. Let me tell you what this is.

I understand that you may be slightly skeeved or grumpy about the word “webinar.” I was both skeeved and grumpy when I first came into contact with it because it seemed trendy — goofy, even. But I was wrong to sniff at the webinar because as it turns out, webinars are great. I’ve taken a bunch of them and I love them.

A webinar is a seminar on the web. (You probably figured that out.) But what you may not know is that the seminars of days past, the ones you saw in college or at “a function,” they were rather dry and you had to sit in a darkened classroom or lecture hall try to not fall asleep. The Internet has changed all that. Now, seminars — webinars! — can be viewed by you in your fuzzy slippers at home, the best of them are bright and fast-moving, full of juicy content, and they are interactive. That’s right: you can ask the person leading the seminar (in this case, me) questions and stuff, while it’s all happening.

Quilters ask me again and again, “How do I choose fabric?” and that question is first answered in regard to color. The color value and its level of contrast in regard to other fabrics, the scale of the print — this is fundamental stuff when you’re making a quilt and you know what? I can help you. I know this stuff.

One Color Me Quilter webinar is one hour. There will be one each month for the next year. (You don’t have to buy them all or anything, don’t worry.) Each month, I focus on a different color — I thought it would be fun to set it up like that and so far, it’s so engaging and interesting, other work has taken a backseat to my work on the show — do not tell my publisher this. The color that will kick off the whole series on Monday and part of the reason I’m geeking out? It’s my favorite color: red. I go through the dyeing process, red’s placement on the color wheel, how to “audition” different reds. You get quilt history. There are patterns to download. There are pitfalls examined and advice is given on how to avoid such things. Visually, it’s a feast. Informationally, it’s Thanksgiving dinner. Let me feed you red.

Do you want to join me? I hope so. It’s $19.99. NOTE: For me to earn my living, it is extremely important that you go to this link first to buy the webinar! You’ll see the list of “Mary Fons Presents” links there, which will take you to the purchase page at Fons & Porter. Being self-employed means any traffic I drive through my own website returns me more pennies on the dollar. Is it sexy to mention it? No. Is it me, lookin’ out for my pennies? Yes! (Remember, I have to buy groceries in Manhattan now. Do you have any idea how much butter costs in the East Village?? It’s not pretty.)

Thank you all. Hey, here’s that link again — you’ll want the first webinar listed, on “Red.” I do hope to see you on Monday, friends. You will like it.