Tag: quilt block

So we have some big news over here at Missouri Star Quilt Company!  We are self publishing a magazine called “Block” and we’re really excited to take this journey with you all!  But more on this in a minute, first, let’s talk about how we got here and why we’re going down this road.

As many of you know, last year we got approached by Fons and Porter and the folks at New Track Media about doing a magazine for them.  Mom was tickled to death at the thought of being in a magazine, so as is the case with most things we do in life, we went to work to make mama happy 🙂

After a year of doing the magazine, we parted ways, Quilting Quickly is no longer a Missouri Star Quilt Company production.  We were bummed out, but life has to go on.

So, like we are prone to do, we sat on our hands content to do nothing (I’m rolling my eyes here :).  Then we kept getting great feedback from you all.  You loved patterns to go along with the videos, you wanted a subscription option, you wished you could order them from the beginning and not have them run out and go away forever.  That was a big one for us!  We have new customers finding us all the time, they want to read about who we are and get the patterns for the tutorials and follow along with our story, but we can’t get them and neither can anyone else.  So we started thinking…

What if we did our own magazine, we would showcase the quilts that we know best, the ones Mom is already a pro at teaching on from the tutorials.  The quilt projects would be the most recent quilt tutorials plus a few legacy ones to help us get caught up with quilts from the archive.  But we didn’t want to start a magazine department that needed advertisers and fancy titled people and things like that, it’s too expensive for a little operation like ours.  So what if instead of advertising, we just featured new fabric lines in the quilts and hoped that the increased exposure for the fabric would be enough?  We liked never having to call anyone to ask for advertising, that was a cool idea.

We had another thought, we should cut the cost down, from $10 to $6 to keep it interesting for you all.  The page count will stay the same, with no advertisements, leaving room for lots more quilting ideas and inspiration.  Did you hear that, zero pages of ads!!  This means we get to do the magazine the way we wanted to.  We get to let the quilts breathe a little bit.  No more trying to smush it all in there, we can show you some pictures, and work through the process.  Do the patterns with a bit more detail, all the things we’ve been wanting to do, we’ll just do them!

So we called everyone we knew who had done anything like that and started asking questions.  Learning how to do this stuff, there was a lot to learn!  We found a great art director, Christine, hired on Stephen and Cassie to help us create and make, then our sister Natalie got to work doing the genius stuff she always does.  She came up with our first issue’s worth of new quilts in an afternoon with Mom, had them made and out the door to be quilted in no time, and is already onto the second issue!

And finally … it’s here!  We’re pulling the cover off our big project we call “Block” – I guess we already told you that, but we are so proud of how it turned out.  Christine did a great job, Natalie did a great job, Stephen and Cassie did a great job, and Mom of course always does a great job! 🙂

So here’s the deal.  If we can tell people about this, if we can get enough people to buy into it, we can keep doing it!  It’s a great price, it’s a beautifully done magazine, and we’re doing 6 issues a year instead of 4.  It’ll be chock full of great patterns, 10 of them, and they’ll each have a coordinating youtube tutorial.  So go tell it on the mountain!  Buy one for a friend, get them hooked!  We can’t do this the old school way.  We don’t have advertisers.  We don’t have rack space at your local big box stores, we have them here and then will be wholesaling them to local independent quilt shops as well, but we need you to help us make this stick!  So give it a read, if you would like to see anything in there, if you have ideas or feedback for us, if you have a designer we should interview or anything like that, let’s do it!  We really hope this journey goes for a while!! We are really excited to keep making great things for you all!  Thank you for supporting our passions!!

The magazine will be in our shop and online in the coming weeks, so you can’t buy it until then, but we did build a subscriber option, so you can subscribe right now, and it’ll be to your door the same time we get it here!  If you subscribe, it’ll ship for free too, so that’s a sweet deal right!  Go do it!  Subscribe Subscribe Subscribe!!