The 2016 Row By Row Experience Begins June 21!

Artistic Artifacts has been participating in the Row by Row Experience for several years now, and its something we look forward to each summer, especially meeting so many new friends (and welcoming back treasured repeat customers) as they embark on their shopping expeditions.

The 2016 event is themed Home Sweet Home and opens this Tuesday, June 21! This event has steadily grown each year and thousands of quilt shops are involved: you can travel across the entire United States and Canada, and — new for 2016 —some locations in Europe!

The Row by Row Experience in-person shop hop focuses on each quilting business creating a full “row” that finishes to 9" x 36". Patterns for the row are distributed for free to any in-store visitor who requests one*. We recruited the talented Cyndi Souder of Moonlighting Quilts to design our row, and love what she’s done:

Paper-pieced houses and trees are sewn using a beautiful mix of Tim Holtz fabrics and our Australian Aborigine-Designed fabrics. The windows (blank here) can be filled in in a variety of ways and we will be sharing those as the summer progresses.

Cyndi will be teaching a new paper piecing class for us in October: keep checking our website for information, as it will be posted soon. Here’s a more detailed view of our 2016 row:

Along with creating a row, most of the participating shops order a special fabric “license plate” for the event. The 2016 Artistic Artifacts plate reads Creative Finds.

Each state or province has a Facebook page (visit the Row by Row website for links) and participating shops post photos of their rows, license plates and submitted quilts (note that you don’t have to have a Facebook account set up to view these photos). Shops love to be creative with the theme each year, so check out the wide variety in how Home Sweet Home has been interpreted. (The Virginia state Facebook page includes Artistic Artifacts: www.facebook.com/VARowbyRowExperience.)

Each participating shop agrees to make a prize of 25 fat quarters of fabric available to the first person who turns in a completed quilt — not just a top, but quilted, bound, and labeled — using at least 8 different 2016 row patterns. This year we are seeing more shops creating their row to be used vertically rather than horizontally, which will add to the challenge of the finished quilts...it will be great to see the creativity of the participants!

You can travel and collect rows through September 6, 2016. Participants then have until October 31 to turn in a completed quilt for the prize. There are some speedy (and competitive) quilters out there, so be aware that most shops give away their prize fairly early in the summer!

We always ask our Row by Row customers to send us photos of their row, their quilt, their designs. Please do email us if you collect our row pattern and use it.

We hope to see many of you this summer!

* Please note: due to event rules, we cannot mail or email patterns: during the official timeframe of The Row by Row Experience, they are only available to in-person store visitors.