frequency | Gala Fabrics

If you are a quilter, you may know of the international shop hop called Row By Row. Many quilt and fabric stores across North America (and even Europe and Australia!) have registered to participate by designing a quilt block based on a theme. This year’s theme is “Sew Musical”. Any sewer can participate as one of the really fun parts of this activity is travelling to all the stores to pick up their free block pattern or purchasing their fabric kit for the block. You only have to pick up eight different blocks, put them together in to a quilt, show the quilt to your nearest participating store to enter to win a prize! What a fun way to be a tourist in your home town or as you travel across the country!

This is our second year participating since we got to visit with many tourists from across Canada as well as the US and Europe. When the theme announcement was made, all the store staff brainstormed ideas as to what our block could be. And, of course we involved our very talented local textile artist and quilt designer, Susan Teece. How could we combine Victoria and music pictorially in a fabric block? We thought of the different music festivals happening in Victoria such as the Jazz fest, Ska fest or Rifflandia but how would we differentiate them from music festivals going on in other cities? Then we thought to try depicting the music used in native ceremonies such as the drums and rattles but all the native artists we asked were not comfortable designing something for quilting as their background was in fashion.

Then there was a news article about a local orca pod having a new baby resident. This was big news in the city as the Southern Resident Orca pod is considered endangered with only 76 whales. With all the news coverage of these animals, we decided to use their sounds as our music theme.