Give a Heart, Get a Heart

We love to engage with our readers! To find out what they’re making, what materials they are experimenting with, the new tools they’ve found, and so on. Because they truly are such a creative bunch — just look at these quilted hearts!

In every issue of Quilting Arts Magazine, we have a new Reader Challenge announcement — a creative challenge to make a quilted something which might be featured in the magazine.

The Heartiest Work

A recent challenge was inspired by the work of Mel Beach in the Fall 2022 issue of Quilting Arts. In this issue, she wrote about creating small stitched and embellished hearts with the expressed purpose of just giving them away. We called it the Give a Heart, Get a Heart Reader Challenge swap!

This challenge was an opportunity for all involved to share their art with other readers in two ways. To start, a selection of the hearts will appear in the Spring 2023 issue of Quilting Arts or online. Then, because it is a swap, all of the hearts will be distributed! Each Reader Challenge participant — whether published or not—will receive a quilted heart created by another reader/quilt artist.

The Results

Our team received about 100 hearts, and we were so touched by the beauty and care we saw in each and every one! We were only able to feature a fraction of the quilted hearts we received in the gallery, but each one was special and touching and made our own hearts smile. This month, we will be sending each of these quilters a heart made by another person participating in the challenge — a small gift from one reader to another.

In case you’re interested in the behind-the-scenes stuff, I first have to thank my colleague Annaliese Troxell for sorting, packing, and otherwise preparing the hearts to go to their new homes.

Annaliese organized all of the hearts, making sure she was sending each participant a ‘new’ heart — not one they made or that was even made by someone who might be a neighbor… Yes, we tried to be careful of that, too! Because some of the hearts were made by groups of friends, we tried to keep track of the cities, towns, and states.

More to Explore

All in all, this was an incredibly beautiful expression of kindness and art! Be sure to check out the Spring issue of Quilting Arts to see a gallery of some of the hearts our readers created for this challenge. After February 28, you’ll be able to buy the digital issue here.

And for those folks who participated in the challenge, you will be receiving your swapped heart over the next couple weeks. We look forward to seeing more of your artwork in our challenges in the future!

Quilt on!
Kristine

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