Sewing News from Around the Web This Week

Missouri Star Quilt Company was named the National Small Business of the Year by President Obama today. What an incredible honor.

The rural one-stoplight downtown of Hamilton, Missouri was full of vacant buildings when the Doan family bought an abandoned antique shop in 2012 to start a fabric store. Today, Hamilton is a tourist destination sometimes referred to as “the Disneyland of quilting” and Missouri Star employees 180 people, making it the largest employer in the county. And Jenny Doan? She’s is a YouTube star. On the Missouri Star channel has she shows 250,000 subscribers how to use pre-cuts to sew quick, charming quilts that are accessible to all skill levels.

For the U.S. Small Business Administration to choose a quilt company as the recipient of this award just a month after Etsy became a publicly traded company? That feels important to me. The maker movement is 10 years old this year and we are now having a significant impact on the U.S. economy. Craft is a $30 billion industry and our work is to be taken seriously.

Listen to Emily McDowell on NPR talking about surviving Hodgkin lymphoma and writing brilliant, compassionate cards that get real about cancer. “When life gives you lemons, I won’t tell you a story about my cousin’s friend who died of lemons.” Get the cards here.

Listen to Alicia Shaffer on NPR saying what she usually says (or don’t).

It’s Mother’s Day on Sunday. Enjoy Kollabora’s sweet video, “Introducing the Daughters.”

Instead of waiting around for someone to buy this for you, go ahead and pre-order Tula Pink’s coloring book. There are designs in here that will be in forthcoming not-yet-released fabric collections. Color them your own way before we see how she colors them.

F+W is working on a Tula documentary taking us along on the journey of creating a new collection. I’m not sure of the release date on this, but it sounds like it’s going to be really good.

That’s the news from here today. If you’ve got newsworthy tips to share with me, I’m all ears. Did you notice that “send me a story tip” tab on the About page up there? And if you like round-ups like this, check out my newsletter. This is what it’s like.