NORTHWEST QUILTING PRODUCTIONS, LLC

Thank you for visiting our site!

We are Aurora and Craig Lowell (with Piper and Allie, respectively, on our laps), the folks behind "Sew You Want To Be A Quilter^TM ." 

Our company is called Northwest Quilting Productions, LLC and we are located in the beautiful Rocky Mountain State of Colorado.  Our company name came from the fact that we were living in Coeur d'Alene, Idaho when we first started developing the idea of creating a quilting game.  We initially set up the company in Idaho.  After moving to Colorado we refiled the company in Colorado because we liked the name so well.

The game started as one of those "you know, I wish we had a game or something to play" type of thoughts at a quilt retreat Aurora was attending in San Diego, California with her best friend Gale Ching.  This was followed closely thereafter by a "why don't we invent a game" which then led to "how about a quilting trivia game!".  One thing led to another and Aurora decided to pursue this idea further.  Aurora mentioned the idea to her husband Craig who, to aid his wife in this pursuit, created an Access database for Aurora to record her questions and answers.

At that time, Aurora was in business as a longarm quilter in Coeur d'Alene, Idaho with her friend and partner Suzanne Patafio.  Their company was called The MooseQuilteers.  While working in the shop Aurora and Suzanne would throw around ideas and came up with about 400 questions.  They thought this was really great, but realized that developing questions was harder than they expected.  Enter Craig.  At that time Craig was working on contract doing database programming for the City of Spokane, Washington.  He was between contracts and had time on his hands so he volunteered to help out.  As he said, when you know nothing about quilting everything is a question!  He was right, his total lack of knowledge, combined with time on his hands, was enough for him to rapidly increase the number of questions in the database.  In fact, when all was said and done, he had developed over 2,000 questions. 

Aurora and Suzanne were impressed, and the potential for actually creating a real game looked high.  But then circumstances changed and Aurora and Craig had to move to Denver for personal and financial reasons.  At this time the development of the game went dormant.  Craig would dabble with adding new questions to the database from time to time, but basically it was one of those "yeah we are going to do this, just not right now" type of things and several years passed.  Finally Aurora came to the conclusion that either they move forward with the game or the quit playing around with the idea.  Craig agreed, and their financial position had changed sufficiently to allow them to invest some money in making the game a reality.  By that time Craig had developed over 3,000 questions and the big "need" was creating the "board" layout for the game.  Aurora and Craig agreed that the "board" should be a quilt, and preferrably a quilt that had been designed by Aurora, then photographed to use as the background for the game. 

Suzanne Patafio, Aurora's partner in her longarm quilting business, offered to help Aurora in the design and creation of the quilt.  Aurora made arrangements to spend several weeks with Suzanne in Coeur d'Alene to create the quilt.  The time came and Aurora and Suzanne labored diligently in the creation of the quilt, working 12-16 hours per day.  They got crazy and had sew much fun together during the next 3 weeks.  Aurora designed quite a few of the buildings in Microsoft VISIO and Suzanne was sew impressed with the program that she learned the how to use VISIO and designed a few too.  Friends, Tris Fisher and Beve Greene also spent many hours helping with the design of the quilt.  Aurora left Coeur d'Alene after three weeks with the background design and buildings in place.  Back in Denver, Aurora spent 2 weeks creating the trees, moose, and embelishments.  Even Craig got involved, personally laying out all of the fences on the design.  Once the quilt was "done" Aurora rented Dianna Kelsey's Gammil longarm quilting machine and spent over 28 hours quilting the quilt.  From design to final quilting over 500 hours of work were required to finish the quilt. 

With finished quilt in hand Aurora and Craig sought out a professional photographer in Denver who could capture the essence of the quilt in the detail required to turn it into a board game.  Lee Milne of Milne Photography was contacted and did an excellent job snapping the picture.  From there it was necessary to convert the "film" into a "digital" format for the ultimate printing.  Enter Jim Beck of Independent Separations who was able to convert the 4 x 5 negative into a 200 meg digital photograph. 

The next issue was finding a production company that could guide Aurora and Craig through the maze of "game production".  Craig researched a number of companies on the internet and made several contacts.  Rehtmeyer, Inc. of Aurora, Illinois, was finally selected and are responsible for the actual production of all the game pieces, packaging etc.

So there you have it, the story of an idea that has become a reality.  We believe that you will find our game to be fun, educational, funny, challenging, and a great addition to your quilting supplies, small quilting groups and quilt retreats.  We have enjoyed bringing it to you and have endeavored to make it something that will be a source of enjoyment for years to come.  We will be following up with new and different products in the near future, sew stay tuned!

Thank you for visiting, we hope you will enjoy "Sew You Want To Be A Quilter^TM " as much as we have enjoyed bringing it to you.

Aurora and Craig Lowell