Applique is my Passion

People get so hung up on a making a project  perfect.  It is so much more fun to have a dialogue with your project, sometimes it speaks to you while you are asleep, or at the art museum and you have an "ah ha!" moment and can move on to the next step.  The hardest part of this quilt was figuring out how to teach someone who can't draw, how to make realistic animal designs with felted appliques.  That eureka moment came when I learned how to make stencils from my patterns. I sent the Wannabees (above) to a quilt show in Oregon this summer and the comment that came back from the judges, was that I should be more careful at the beginning and endings of my quilting stitches.  (I have no idea what they are talking about!) It didn't matter to them that I was quilting a large 6 lb. quilt on my HOME SEWING MACHINE and that the quilting was not the outstanding feature of the quilt.  They didn't seem to notice that I was doing something that nobody else...

This past two weeks or so, I have been working with my niece, who is also my graphic designer, designing a banner to hang in our booth at quilt shows.  We collaborated to get the finished design to the printer.  My major in college was Fabric Design...before computers, Katherine's major was Graphic Design with courses in Illustrator.  For me to learn Illustrator would be a steep learning curve.  We started out with the purpose of the banner: to explain why our patterns are loved by our customers.  I wrote the benefits and she designed the layout which went through quite a lot of changes.  Without trying to hurt her feelings, I asked her why she chose the background colors she chose.  She replied that choosing colors was not her forte.  I suggested that she look at www.design-seeds.com.  She suggested that I research the colors I wanted.  I came up with this as my first choice: I loved how the animals looked in silhouette, but Paul...

I don't know what took so long.  Usually it doesn't take a month to finish writing a pattern, but I guess I wasn't as focused as I usually am.  The Crows pattern has 17 pages, seven pages of which are of crows drawings and one page of feather drawings for the quilting in the border.   Crows pattern  is up on our website ready to fly to your house as a PDF pattern or a printed snail mailed pattern.