Quilt Blogging in 2019 with Vicki Holloway

Today I’m chatting with Vicki Holloway about quilt blogging in 2019. She’s actively blogged for over ten years and has a great take on how blogging and sharing online has changed over the years. Enjoy!

Listen to the podcast or download it to your computer using this player:

Jump to timestamp: 20:21 to get straight to the interview with Vicki!

I had Vicki on the show about this time last year where we talked about time management. Click Here to find that episode. She has a really good take on that because Vicki runs a longarm quilting business. She’s also a nurse and regular blogger so she really had a great perspective on time management.

News from around the House

I’m cutting up some beautiful green squares for a new quilt. I had an idea for making a supersized version of our next Friendship Quilt Along block, the Tree of Life. This is basically taking the block and super sizing it and turning it into a throw size quilt. Of course once I had the idea I couldn’t let it go so I had to make the quilt right now!

That’s going to be an extra bonus pattern included in next month’s pattern. You can find all of the friendship blocks linked up together at Leahday.com/Friendship, and the Tree of Life block plus bonus quilt pattern will be out on February 1.

Speaking of the Friendship Quilt Along, this week I shared a tutorial on how to quilt a design with a combination of straight lines with ruler foot quilting and loopy lines on my longarm.

I’m really learning a lot about what designs work best because I don’t have a very big longarm. It’s actually quite narrow and I only have about 10 inches that I can quilt comfortably with my ruler plate on the machine.

I wanted to have diagonal lines going through the middle of the block, but that would’ve been bigger than my frame allows and I would have to break thread a lot and it really wouldn’t work easily. So I broke it down and quilted the block in quarters on the longarm frame.

Each month I’m quilting the blocks for the Friendship Sampler two times, once on my home machine and once on my longarm. Check out all of the tutorials shared so far right here.

Quilting Friends Club

I have got to say super super thank you to everyone who joined our new quilting friends club! This is a membership club and for less than the cost of a fat quarter a month you can join in the fun and become my BEST quilting friend!

It’s a brand-new platform, completely removed from Facebook and away from all the other social media places that aren’t a lot of fun these days. It’s really nicely organized so that you can more easily find the post you’re interested in like the Friendship Quilt Along. I love seeing all the blocks that have been posted so far and this is helping me feel so supported and appreciated. It’s filled my bucket right up to the brim!

You can find this new club and be able to support the podcast and all of the videos that I create at QuiltFriends.Club

How Do I Quilt It? Series

I have a new, special series of videos that’s exclusive to this new club. It’s called How Do I Quilt It? and members of the club can share a picture of a quilt you’re struggling to pick a quilting design for and ask for help.

Once a month I’ll take those images, print them out and share three different design ideas per each quilt. I just shot the first video this week and I love being able to dig into the design side of things and be able to help you understand quilting design better and pick the designs for your quilts!

Check this out and help support the blog, free tutorials, and podcast by joining the new Quilting Friends Club!

What is Actually Fun?

This weekend we went up to Asheville for Josh’s birthday and visited Biltmore and honestly it wasn’t a lot of fun. It was too crowded and the house has changed so much and they really nickel and dime you through the whole thing. It just ended up being really unpleasant, but we got some great pictures at least!

We went to Renaissance Festival this fall and it was just so crowded it wasn’t any fun either. We need to figure out what feels fun for us and it’s not what it used to be. Places and events like that have become mainstream and they’re just too crowded.

I think just staying at home and working on a project here would have been a lot more fun. What can I say, I’m a home body and this is where I’m happiest!

Make Ms. Bunny Today!

I finally got the downloadable version of the Ms. Bunny sewing pattern done this week! If you’ve been waiting on a downloadable version so that way you don’t have to pay shipping, it is available now. You can download it and print it out and be able to make your Ms. Bunny doll today.

I’m planning to share a tutorial on making her dress and panties very soon. I’m also experimenting with Spoonflower fabric to see if I can design a cut and sew pattern so you can just get a yard of fabric and be able to cut her out and sew her together that way too.

But this is still in testing so stay tuned for more news about new Ms. Bunny versions and Mally as well!

More Mally the Maker Books

This week I finished my book Rise to the Challenge of Your Life and I’m setting it aside for a bit of space before editing. I’m turning my attention back to the second book in the Mally the Maker series.

I had an idea last week for sharing something new in the podcast – short stories from the Mally universe! This will help me accomplish multiple goals at once: practice book narration, write more about Mally and the many characters in the book, and add something fun to share here on the podcast for you to listen to!

Josh has had an idea for quite some time about a pink rooster who was barely mentioned in a fight scene in the book. He named the character and started making up stories for him. So I asked Josh to write it down and he’s hopefully going to finish it up this week.

I hope it will be entertaining and you’ll enjoy the stories and it’ll be something you can share with your kids!

Blogging in 2019 with Vicki Holloway

Vicki Holloway has been blogging about quilting since 2008. Click Here to find her blog at MyCreativeCorner3.Wordpress.com.

She started as a way to connect with other quilters in northern Michigan so it was very much social media in the beginning. She loves to write and slowly built her skills for photography while blogging too.

We both have older blogs and have migrated from Blogger to WordPress, which is important as Google isn’t properly updating Blogger anymore. We both feel pressure to update our old posts and improve the photos, but it’s hard to allocate the time for that and it’s VERY overwhelming.

Vicki now has a free WordPress site, which limits how many photos she can share. Instead of seeing that as a limitation, this has helped her figure out ways around it and she now embeds HTML codes from her Instagram account and YouTube videos too.

It’s important if you migrate your blog to make sure you don’t lose your links because that is how people find you. Without the links, you will lose all search engine traffic too. Vicki did lose her links, but thankfully her followers have eventually found her new blog.

How she blogs and what she shares has changed since 2008. Vicki used to share more of a day to day journal but soon found she didn’t have time to read all of the ones she was following and realized many quilters probably weren’t reading her blog either.

How Vicki’s Quilting Blog has Changed

It’s now a decade later and it’s hard because everyone has a blog. Vicki decided she didn’t want to write all that personal stuff anymore. She shares less text, but more photos linked through Instagram and keeps many posts private for her own personal use.

She uses her blog as a landing page where everything is connected: patterns, twitter, Instagram, her podcast, and more.

We discussed how the world seems both extra sensitive AND at the same time extra critical, which is a strange combination. Vicki is a nurse so she’s spent most of her life reading nonverbal communication and feels like so much is missing out of a text comment. We can read so much more into something that was meant as a joke and take it the wrong way.

We both agree – if you can’t say something nice, don’t say anything. That’s an old saying and it’s still true in 2019!

Keeping Track of Social Media

Vicki is great at managing her time so she sets limits on her social media use. She spends 30 minutes in the morning, then a bit of time at lunch, and 30 minutes in the evening and that’s it. I really like this model too and especially setting a timer so I have to stop when time is up.

Vicki is a longarm quilter, but she hasn’t found being online and blogging to be a great way to build her business. She has found many more clients in person, and having local customers just makes more sense because they don’t have the extra cost of shipping and worry that a quilt will get lost in the mail.

Vicki’s word of the year is experiences. She wants to meet new people, teach in person more, travel and experience new things!

Make sure to check out Vicki’s blog at MyCreativeCorner3.Wordpress.com to learn more about her, and also check out her Podcast My Creative Corner 3 as well. I love her funny take on things and chill demeanor each week. It’s both refreshing and calming and sometimes exactly what I need while I’m working on a new quilt.

Let’s go quilt,

Leah Day