Welcome to our first edition of the Jersey Girls News. This newsletter is interactive. Clicking on the red colored texts will take you to the appropriate pages on our website. We would love to hear from you, so check us out and let us know what you think. 

Poodles Noel is Yolanda’s newest line, which is just being introduced to quilt shops.  It should be available for customers to purchase shortly.  There is a free brochure with instructions for several projects being distributed to the shops that purchase the fabric line.  These same instructions are also available for free downloads on our web site, in addition to a few other bonus designs.

Fabric News : How to Buy Our Fabrics

If there are any of our fabrics that you cannot find at your LQS, please contact us.  As designers, we have a limited supply of most of the patterns and can sell on a first-come-first-served basis.  Since we are designers and not a quilt shop, our web site is not set up for traditional online fabric purchases.  Please email us for yardage availability.  Our price is $8.00 per yard, plus actual shipping charges.  We will invoice you through Paypal and ship the fabric as soon as payment is received.  As we grow, we envision setting up a more user-friendly fabric shop for your fabric shopping pleasure. For now we are trying to make it as simple as we can by providing interactive PDF order forms for each line. Click here to go to the "Fabrics" page on our website and see how to order fabric from us.

Book& Pattern News

Jersey Girls is on the move and adding new books, too.  Look for our second collaboration this summer – “Fuse It and Be Done!”  This book is a primer for learning how to use all things fusible.  Stay tuned for some previews shortly.

You can order signed copies of our first book, “Holiday Quilts” and a few other titles on our site under Books.

If you need hints or tricks to help make your sewing and quilting easier, please visit “Barbara’s Quilting Basics”.  You can download a pdf file of basic techniques and also an article on machine quilting an odd-shaped quilt to make it completely reversible.   As time goes on, we will be adding more tutorials and technique articles to with tips and tricks that we have learned along our journey.  Barbara loves to find innovative ways to make projects quicker and easier to complete.

Now for some other exciting news - the "Alzheimer's Forgetting Piece by Piece" exhibit that has been traveling the country since early last year has been extended until 2010, with a six-month exhibit scheduled for the Shelburne Museum in Vermont (from May to October 2010).  Approximately 100,000 visitors will have the opportunity to see them there!
Barbara has a quilt honoring her mom which is traveling with this fund-raising venture to raise money and awareness about this insidious disease.  There are approximately twenty other venues where it may be seen in the next two years, with more being added. 
You can purchase a book which showcases all the quilts in the exhibit for $20.00, with all profits going to research.  Learn more about this non-profit organization and its activity by visiting www.alzquilts.org.

One of Barbara's quilts has been chosen to be featured in the gallery of Irena Bluhm's new book by AQS, Quilts of a Different Color. Look for it in the spring of this year.

Yolanda recently had an exhibit of her fine art print series A Garden Alphabetized (for your viewing pleasure ). The prints were accompanied by 26 essays by botanical writer and lecturer, Marta McDowell. (Author of Emily Dickinson’s Garden ). The exhibit has been collected into a book. It is a great mother’s day or gardener’s birthday gift and can be previewed and purchased at: www.lulu.com/content/1444981 or for a signed copy you can order directly from Yolanda by clicking here.

Visit www.yolandafundora.com to see more of Yolanda's fine art endeavors and the series in detail. Quilters might also be interested in two series that looks at digital printmaking from a quilters/fabric-lover’s point of view: Visual Thinking Series  and Salon des Textiles Refusés.

Among the books selected by the First Lady of Puerto Rico, Luisa Gándara, and the Puerto Rico Department of Education to give to the children as part of Three Kings Day celebrations (Latin American equivalent of Christmas Day for kids) was  Mi cerebro no va a salir flotando/My Brain Won't Float Away, written by Annette Pérez and illustrated by Yolanda Fundora (published September 2007). In the photo, a girl receives My Brain Won't Float Away as a gift. Visit Editorial Campana to learn more about the dynamic bilingual publishing house Yolanda works with.

She is currently illustrating a second bilingual children’s book for Campanita, the juvenile division of Editorial Campana: A Very Smart Cat / Una gata Muy Inteligente.

My Brain Won't Float Away is available at Amazon and other major bookstores.

You can win a signed copy of our Holiday Quilts book plus one yard of Tannenbaum fabric of your choice (which was used throughout the book).  To enter, we are asking that you forward the original email announcement of this newsletter to your interested friends and family.  We will be keeping track of who forwards to the most people by February 29 (Remember: you must copy us at feb2008contest@soeasyheirlooms.com in each forwarded email).  We will notify the winner and our newsletter list in early March once the numbers are tallied.  Good luck to all and thanks for your participation.

Customer Gallery: We are striving to make our site as user-friendly as possible. If you have any photos of projects you have made from our fabrics, our patterns or our books, please send them to us so that we can feature you and your work in our Gallery of Quilts. We love hearing from our customers and quilting friends. Please email us with questions or comments as our goal is to create a “Jersey Girls” community extending around the country and around the world.
Coming soon to our website: Barbara’s Secret Closet & Yolanda’s Stash. We'll let you know!

Thank you for reading all the way to the end. – Barbara & Yolanda

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