https://www.threadbias.com/design_tool_contest_entries/briar-rose-sparkling-petals

There were five others that deserve honorable mention, here too. They are beautiful!

How great is it that we live in a world where creative tools like this exist? Thanks to everybody who participated and to Threadbias and Windham Fabrics. 

We can't wait to get back to The Ace for what will be our third year of workshops. We'll be sewing again, of course, but we will also be offering some other great craft projects and special events, plus the yummy food and drink that The Ace is especially known for, all in the loveliest of settings. We've got The Commune booked again for our workspace, with its big walls that open all the way up, right in front of our very own pool. You can even bring the pooch.

Reserve Your Spot!

If you'd like us to reserve a spot for you, please submit your info via this form. We will get in touch with you about your room options and then ask for a deposit of 50% of the total cost. Workshop fees, which include two days of classes, breakfasts and dinners, and some fun evening events, range from $895 - $1100 depending on your room preference. You canview the rooms here. We'll ask you for the balance 90 days before the workshop starts.

We've been doing workshops at The Ace for a few years. To see pictures of past workshops, check this page out. If you have any questions, don't hesitate to email us.

The idea behind this workshop came from many conversations with AnnaMaria and Annabel, both of whom have dedicated a lot of time to making things with their kids, and both of whom are, like me, pretty fond of The Ace in Palm Springs. We've decided to converge there, midwinter, with our families in tow, and hope that you'll join us and that, this time, you'll bring along your mothers and / or your daughters.

The format will be a bit more structured than our Weekend Sewing Workshops, but that doesn't mean that you won't have time for some lounging by the pool. Annabel, who is a kids sewing teacher and kids sewing book author, will be leading sewing worshops specifically designed for kids and beginners. Anna Maria will be focussed on the handwork and needlecrafts that she loves, and I'll be teaching some of my favorite projects from Heather Ross PRINTS. Workshoppers will rotate through stations in the most workspace imagineable: The Commune, with a few pitstops at the pool (pretty easy to do, since it's literally part of our event space!) and to enjoy some fabulous meals.

Reserve Your Spot!

If you'd like us to reserve a spot for you, please submit your info via this form. We will get in touch with you about your room options and then ask for a deposit of 50% of the total cost. Workshop fees, which include two days of classes, breakfasts and dinners, and some fun evening events, range from $1875 to $2025 for two people, depending on your room preference. You can view the rooms here. We'll ask you for the balance 90 days before the workshop starts.

We've been doing workshops at The Ace for a few years. To see pictures of past workshops, check this page out. If you have any questions, don't hesitate to email us.

And if you'd like to gift this workshop to a mom (hello, last minute mother's day gift!) we can work with you to find a fun way to surprise her.

And not to worry, if you had your heart set on Palm Springs without kiddos, we've got a solo crafties weekend in the works too. Stay tuned!

So many people drew their pets! Here's a great example from Ruth, who drew her adorable dog several times over the course of the challenge. Here is her "before and after":

And Anne Sullivan, who tackled her cats (you know what I mean there!), and compared her results. More of Anne's work (very inspiring) can be seen on the Flickr site that she set up for this challenge. This one is my favorite "before and after's", because it shows her progress so clearly.

some of my favroite work was sent in by +++, who is clearly has past experience and practice, and who rediscovered drawing through this challenge. She sent me some amazing drawings of her kids, but I'm posting this one, of her shoe, as a reminder that subjects can be found anywhere.

And if these drawings aren't enough to inspire you, I'm copying and pasting some text from some of the emails I got. So what are you waiting for?? Put a sketchbook (I like Moleskin) and a pencil (I use the cheap mechanical ones from Staples or Muji, 4B, and a kneaded eraser, which swallows those pesky little erser bits rather than leaviong them on your kitchen table) next to your coffemaker and start making drawing a part of your morning routine. Even if it's just to capture a single cheerio.

You can see more at the Flickr Site.

-Heather

UPDATE! We've now closed pre-orders for our Briar Rose Collectors Packs. We will, however, very likely have some extras. If you'd like us to contact you in the event that we do, please leave us your email here.

You can also pre-order the fabric through some of our favorite retailers, including:

Purl Soho

Pink Castle Fabrics

If you'd like to place a pre-order for a Briar Rose Collectors Pack, please do so before May 1 (how is it already practically May???). We've been getting lots of questions from folks about the quilt, so YES, the collectors pack includes exactly what you need to make the Rainbow Quilt (below) and YES, if you want to make the quilt and also keep the fabric, you are more than welcome to order two collectors packs. You just need to fill out the submission for twice! And to address those questions coming in about the "Field Strawberry" print, yes, I was actually trying to come up with an art print that matched the quilt. And yes, I do agree that it makes decorating a kids room in a pretty, simple way very easy! We'll hopefully do it again, though I can't take a lot of credit for the quilt design, since that belongs over here....

We get a lot of requests from people looking to buy fabric from us, but have never sold it directly in our online shop, until now! Our friends at Windham are making special Collectors Packs for us, which include a half yard of each print, which we will be combining with a limited edition 13” by 19” signed print called “Field Strawberry”, shown here, which is really just a giant ode to our most favorite sign of spring: the wild strawberry. We love the way this particular print looks with the Briar Rose Rainbow Quilt, which was designed by my friend Rae, and for which there will be a FREE pattern available over at Windham beginning in July. You need a half yard of each print to make the quilt, conveniently!

The Briar Rose Collectors Pack will be available by reservation only. If you’d like us to make one for you, you just need to fill out this simple form. We won’t invoice you until it’s ready to ship. We expect that will happen in July, about the same time the fabrics begin to appear in stores.

Check out the work posted here, on the flickr site, and tune back in on Tuesday when we announce the winner of our "most improved" award!

I must admit, I didn’t read the whole thing, I ran out of time because it took me twenty two minutes to convince my 19 month old daughter to let me put on her shoes and then I had to literally run to the subway to make it to a meeting, so maybe somewhere near the end the author stopped to consider the fact that the subject of her story, much like every other woman living within the bounds of this magazine’s domestic subscription service, is a member of the only generation of american women to have ever lived that truly have the luxury of choice between career and full time motherhood, not to mention anything in the ever-expanding grey area that lies between that we might be crazy enough to consider attempting, and I just missed it.

Its an awesome thing to consider, isn’t it? That we actually have that choice? And I don’t know about you, but when you consider that fact it makes listening to someone like this woman prattle on about her adorable husband and giving up her gratifying pre-baby career sound a whole lot like the two women standing behind me at the coffee bar at the Tribeca Whole Foods this morning discussing wether or not they should have to pay their housecleaners extra for doing laundry, and not just because both discussions are incredibly boring.

And the idea that this woman has this luxury of choice, between career and raising their children, because she has an education? If that were true then my husband, who holds several degrees and also has a real knack for managing our toddler, would have a choice too, when the reality, at least for him, is that taking a few years off to raise our children would be career suicide, and would probably also cost him, through the rules of social norms that have applied, unchanged, to men for centuries, many of his friendships.

This woman has this choice, this luxury of a choice, as difficult and decadent as it is, not just because she has a skill or an education, but because of the generations of american women who came before her, because of the rules that they broke and the laws that they challenged and all of the frightening and humbling and brave things that they had to do, so that their daughters would have the freedom - within their society as well as within their own minds -  to choose between two equally righteous paths. How disappointing that this woman, who has "put her children first", is on the cover (in a proud pose that almost completely obscures her child, I might add) when an inspiring story about a loving, committed for life, couple made up of two women, which runs in the same issue, is not. Feminist housewife, indeed. Who here, is the courageous one, bilking the system and blazing a new trail towards equality? Or wait, what's the definition of feminism again? I'm getting confused. I thought it was something about believing in the importance of freedom of choice.

This is not a new or newsworthy debate, it’s one that plays itself out in the mind of every american woman through every phase of her life, and regardless of the side we each choose or the variation or combination of the two paths that we opt to attempt to wrangle on a daily - no, hourly -  basis, it will not be concisely answered by any one of us, regardless of trends. Each of us must do what is best for us, and for our families and our children, and like it or not, we all must choose a side, and then, in the name of good manners if nothing else, we ought to just respect, even support, one another and the decisions we each have made, and shut the hell up about it.

illustration from "Mouse House", by Rumer Godin and Adrianne Adams

My favorites are Billy Collins, Mary Oliver, and Rachael Mayer. This one is a current favorite, by Rachael. Its about mice. 

Here's a link to more of her work.

One hundred thousand generations of field mice ago
it was our first summer
in the gray clapboard house.
At first we saw them in our periphery—
speeding along baseboards, and because we were
children they both delighted and terrorized us in equal

measure, like all things that were in a state of tender balance
that summer;
flour and baking powder, salt and pepper, things
that were broken, things repaired,
spoke and wheel, malaise and memory,
love and exhaustion.

One morning in the kitchen there they were,
hours old, born sometime in the timeless part
of night,
in the darkness of the silverware drawer,
a makeshift mouse barn where just
one sliver of light penetrated the cracks in the wood.

We had rushed the drawer
clamoring for spoons,
starving in the perpetual hunger of growth,
as the air hummed slightly,
our heads still warm from traces of wool blankets
with satin trim, and our own young breath—

yet our feet were so cold steam almost rose from them
as mornings then
were so much colder than mornings now, one hundred
thousand mouse generations later.
All the walls in the house were a robin’s egg blue,
except the kitchen

which was a pale yellow, lighter
and softer than but not unlike lemon.
In the drawer they fit together like thumbs
In a tight formation of milkiness and air, risen
like yeast bread.
Even our mother

who was genuinely afraid of them
was rendered speechless,
a natural improbability for her,
and noticed that
upon closer inspection they
had paper cuts for eyes

and small ears like tiny folded napkins
and feet like feet—
and it occurred to her
as this feeling of grace came over her
that this was a sort of miracle.
In the lemony kitchen

each of us, pale and pink—
with hair not unlike the various nests and webs
in the gray house—
stared into the drawer where they lay like spoons
and squirmed slightly, so unfinished without fur.
Our breathing was steady and even, in sync with the unknowable

vibrations all around us, in cadence with the air
threading its way through the dense mountain laurel.
We stood near
our mother, a disheveled goddess
with robin’s egg blue eyes and yellow hair,
and, in this

alive.
In the kitchen the curtains
drew breaths
as the day began to ripen.
Outside the twitching of ferns,
under the endless canopy of leaves,

the baritone frogs,
the flattened places
where fauns
had slept.
And field mice. Millions
of field mice.