You know I promised to blog at least once a week when I started this venture! I thought to myself, how hard could it possibly be to add this to my oh so quiet and simple life of 3 small children, fabric design, pattern writing, quilt teaching, husband care, house maintaining, garden weeding and several dozen other small and somewhat menial tasks? What was I thinking? But every week that goes by and I haven’t blogged, I feel you waiting and waiting and checking and checking to see if maybe….. Waiting patiently I know, some of you have emailed me to see if maybe I had dropped off the face of the earth. Thanks for checking in! So all of the above is by way of an exlanation to hopefully show you that I’m not a total slacker, but in serious need of some HELP…
Hello there friends & fellow fabric lovers! I am back from Spring Quilt Market in Salt Lake City and I feel like I am experiencing some kind of cultural re-entry! My house is in chaos, my garden is full of weeds and blooms that haven’t been dead-headed in weeks [what’s dead-heading? my husband asks innocently :-)], my munchkins barely remember what I look like, my husband hasn’t seen a full nights rest in months and I won’t even start talking about my studio…. yikes! Although maybe later tonite, I might show you what it looks like before I start the cathartic cleaning process that I go through every time I come back from Market. Market itself was wonderful and extremely successful [even though I did get food-poisoning after going out with some of the folks from MODA and…
Okay.. I’ve finally conquered my technical difficulties!! My quilt pictures, which by the way I thought were uploading all the time, are now finally loading! If anyone else has this problem… I had to change shots that I had ready for print production in CMYK to RGB or change them specifically for the web???? Go figure? They were coming up on my MAC but not on my husbands PC? Could I tell you what that means…. no. But for those of you who have been emailing or asking me about why you can’t see all of my images… please try it now… Keeping my fingers crossed… I’m adding them here to this post too so you don’t have to scroll down if you don’t want to…
Isn’t it amazing how quickly a new interest or new pursuit can take hold? Less than a month ago, if someone had mentioned a Pam Kitty Morning or a Happy Zombie or a Posie Gets Cozy or a Portabello Pixie, I would have had absolutely no idea what they were talking about. Not even a clue! But these days, all of these people are included in my weekly blog visits and I feel like maybe I kind of know them. I couldn’t recognize a one of them on the street, and yet I know alot about what they’ve been doing, what they’ve been sewing and how they have been spending their time. Kind of strange if you step back and think about it really…. Anyway, today some yardage of my new MODA fabric, Allspice Tapestry, arrived. I have to tell you…
sorry, so sorry about the week long absence…. book, pattern and fabric deadlines. I swore I would not let them get the best of me…. well, let’s just say I’m trying to be true to my word [I’m sure my husband would say I was failing, LOL]. As I’m cleaning up my studio after a flurry of design, I often find myself designing a whole new slew of projects in the process. I don’t set out to do it and don’t intend to work, just to clean. But somehow in the process of cleaning up and playing with all those discarded scraps and swatches of fabric and putting away all those design resources, my mind quickly starts a fresh… This time around I was so inspired by my wheels of wool swatches. Their texture and their colors just…
I just wanted to thank everybody for such a warm welcome to blogland. It really is a magical place that you don’t know is there until you find it. Then you wonder how you ever got along without it. You have showered me with emails and left such lovely comments… a girl could get addicted to this! I am sorry if I haven’t had a chance to respond to all your emails or comments yet. I’ve been answering a few at a time, especially all the emails. This week has been one of those deadline weeks for me that I know other designers have blogged about in graphic detail. I have to tell you that although I don’t enjoy the anxiety that usually surrounds this time, I do work well under pressure and so I have gotten an unbelievable amount of…
Fig Tree’s newest line of fabric is about to hit the streets, so to speak! I have to admit that I have been working & creating with this fabric for many months now and am almost ready to move on to something new and different but I know that it is new for all of you and I am excited to see what you think and what you do with it. One of my favorite things about designing fabrics is when I get to see the wonderful creations you all come up with. Honestly, I am often inspired all over again when I see what your imaginations have created, even more so than by my own designs sometimes. For me seeing the fabric through someone else’s creativity is one of the greatest “perks” of being a designer. I never get tired of people sending…
One of the questions I get asked the most often is, “What is Fresh Vintage?” If you’ve looked at our website or ever heard me lecture or do a workshop, you’ll know that I call the look and feel of the palette I use for Fig Tree, “Fresh Vintage”. I’ve been calling it that for so long, I don’t even know how it started except that I can tell you that is is very descriptive of what the style actually is. It is “VINTAGE” in that we work hard to reproduce colors and designs from yesteryear, using the tones that were used so much in days gone by. Now, mind you, these are not pastels or “cottage” colors or primary colors as we think of today, not that I have anything against any of…