Category Archives: What She or He Said – Quotes from Others

Introducing Collage!

Posted on by
83

My friend Carrie Bloomston of SUCH Designs has just sent her first fabric collection, Collage (for Windham Fabrics), out into the world, and lucky me, I get to share it with you!

collage-catalog (1)

I met Carrie at the Long Beach Quilt Festival in 2011. Her debut booth was a spark of bright and cheerful in an otherwise black-draped sea of business-as-usual. I was immediately drawn to her Wonky Little Houses pattern, and she and I ended up having a wonderful gab.

At the time, I was barely a year out of grad school, and still utterly exhausted and somewhat shell-shocked by the experience of surviving an MFA program. Carrie shared that she was still recovering from a demanding program at RISD, but that playing with fabric was moving her back into her old skin, and that painting was once again calling to her. We ended up bonding over being refugees from art school.

Fast forward to last year… Carrie and I ended up in adjacent booths at Long Beach 2012. It was my first big show as Hunter’s Design Studio, and we again shared a bunch of important conversations about navigating this crazy quilt world. She left me with a story about the danger of wearing layers of other people’s coats (as in allowing yourself to be weighed down with other people’s ideas of how your business should be run) and truly, it was just the conversation I needed to hear that day! So that’s the story of how we met – like many quilting stories… two women find a common thread, and as we pass it back and forth, we weave a friendship. I can’t think of a better way to make new friends.

Anyhow – back to the important task at hand… introducing the fabric! Collage is sweet evidence that Carrie made it back to her paints, and obviously had some fun. Carrie sent fabric to all her blog tour folks, and asked us to just make something from it. If you’ve been following the tour, you’ll see that we all found something in the line that spoke to our own way of seeing the world, and some great projects have ensued.

36530-2

For me, the fabrics have a sense of wonder, play and delight – all things I know that Carrie (and I) have worked hard to regain after formal education. Being a Word Girl, I love the text fabrics the best, and adore the many encouraging sayings that Carrie purposely built into them.

36525-4

I really enjoy using spots and stripes in things, and Collage offers a bunch of both. The border Birdie print is spectacular, and really usable. The “solids” have subtle tone variations and lines that create depth beyond a flat, monochromatic field. There really isn’t a piece in the group that can’t stand on its own, or play well with others.

Bag smaller

I chose to make one of my latest patterns with the fabric, a chunky little messenger-style bag (the pattern is making its debut here!). While the text fabrics called to me the most, I thought the Birdies made for a better lead role on the flap, with the teal cups and scrappy newspaper stripes as wonderful supporting players. Because I couldn’t find a comfortable way to put ORANGE on the bag, I instead used the deep orange-red scrappy stripes to whip up a little tissue holder to go with it. I had to get my ORANGE in there somehow!

DSCN2164

The lovely folks at Windham Fabrics have offered each blog host a layer-cake pack of all the Collage fabrics as a giveaway! So leave me (and Carrie!) a comment below to enter in the drawing for the layer cake, and I’ll use the random number site to choose a winner. I’ll leave the comments on for a couple of days (let’s say the end of my Tuesday), but don’t wait too long to throw your hat in the ring!

And in case you’ve missed them, here’s the blog tour roster – stop in and see all the things Collage can do:

April 9 – Julie Goldin 
April 11 – April Rhodes
April 12 – Tia Curtis
April 14 – Ramona Burke
April 15 – Sally Keller
April 16 – Angela Walters
April 19 – Jenny Kelly

April 22 –Karen Le Page (One Girl Circus)

Passion

Posted on by
3

I drive a Miata. I bought my first in 1996, and my second (and current) in 2001. I’m approaching 300K lifetime Miata miles, and I still look out the window, espy my car and think she’s pretty. I remember seeing the first print ad for these little roadsters in 1990 and having that gut level “oh-my-god-I-want-one” feeling. In my eyes the designers did something right, and passion ensued. The first US Miata club was born before the first Miata rolled off a boat – that’s the kind of passion it generated.

Over the years I’ve had many discussions about the merits and pitfalls of a two-seater with a small trunk. No, you can’t get a month’s worth of groceries and dog food in it. Yes, you have to pack small (but I’ve gone camping with it). No, its rear wheel drive was not optimal for three Virginia winters during grad school. Yes, the same rear wheel drive it is the bomb for twisty road play. I point out that the car fits me ninety-nine percent of the time and when it doesn’t, I borrow something bigger and return it with a full tank and deep gratitude. I like that it is nimble and small. I like that I get both decent performance and good mileage. I like having only one empty seat instead of three when I’m stuck in traffic solo (which, living in LA, is a daily occurrence) and pondering about all that wasted space in cars. I like dropping the top and getting my ration of sunshine. When I helped my teenage son buy a Miata, I was thrilled that there could be only one (not four) other kids in the car distracting him.

And so what does this have to do with quilting, pattern designing, art, running an entrepreneurial business, or even life, for that matter? Passion. And knowing in your gut what works for you.

Continuing the car stories, some years ago I read a great car article about the Dodge Viper vs. the Toyota Camry (and I have searched to find it again, to no avail, so what you are getting is perhaps not what was written, but what I took away from it). The article spoke to designing something that people could be passionate about. The Viper had a pretty small niche: it had two seats, serious horsepower, rudimentary creature comforts and a price tag of $70K at the time (they start at $95K now). It was a throaty, stiff ride. The first time one passed me on the freeway I thought I oughta take up smoking, it sounded that good. The Camry was then, and still is, one of the top selling all-around sedans. The article pointed out that the Viper had a small but positively rabid following. Clubs were forming. Speed shops were coming up with fun go-faster bits and pieces. And then they pointed to the Camry. And they pointed out all of its great features (and there are many). And they pointed out that while a lot of people bought this car that is obviously designed by committee to not engender any dislike, the flip side of that was that it didn’t engender much passion either. Since reading that article I ask anyone I meet that drives a Camry to tell me about it, and they pretty much all describe a bowl of vanilla ice cream. Nothing much to complain about at all, but not a lot to enthuse about either. The article concluded that rather than shrink the world of car design to the idea that there could be one car that meets most needs, we should celebrate that for some people the Camrys are the best fit, and we should still design the Vipers for the ardent few that want them, that *get* them.

And so back to the art business again. As I tooled up for the Long Beach show I was inundated with advice on how to do it like a lot of other people do it. And a lot of it was great advice that was duly noted and acted upon. But I was aware that there is this other part of the puzzle – the Viper criteria if you will. At the end of the day it needed to be my voice that was singing. Obviously from the business perspective I would love to have the sales of the Camry – lots and lots of patterns leaving the booth. But I find that what I really want is the passion of the Viper. I want to make something that I am entirely committed to, that I can stand behind, that I can own with deep, gut-truth passion. I want to make it in orange if I’m moved to do so, if orange is the right solution to the aesthetic problem for me, and not care that “most people don’t like orange and it might sell better in blue.” I want to find my Viper club: the people who are excited about what I design, the people who *get* me and my ideas. And of course, if that Viper club happens to be as populous as Camry owners, I might be able to buy a new Miata!

So let’s make all the different art that can be made. And let’s give up the idea that it should have to conform to the mass market to do so. Make it passionately, and it will find its following.

Typographic image courtesy of Inksurge.

Not a Fabric Crush, but a crush nonetheless!

Posted on by
1

My friend Carrie over at SUCH Designs created this little gem of a sewing machine from the family Lego pile, and generously shared a tutorial on how to make it here.

Now there’s a way to ask Lego to make it for real – check it out.

I so want one of these. Alas… The Boy (my son) is grown and gone and there is no Lego left in my house. Which is maybe a good thing considering how much of it I had to pick from between my toes back then. And I know all you parents have had the same “conversation” about keeping the bedroom floor free of the Lego minefield!

And so now I plot and scheme… who still had Lego-loving kids at home, and how much can I bribe them? Hmmmm….

What She Said – Kathy Loomis on choosing your fabric

Posted on by

Kathy Loomis, over at Art With A Needle, wrote thoughtfully yesterday about designer fabric lines. Head over there and give it a read.

It seems that a brouhaha developed over a designer’s fabric being used in a book, and the designer was not specifically credited. Not having read the actual brouhaha, I can’t comment on its validity or resolution. But I can say that I agree with Kathy that this type of stuff is problematic.

I’ve designed patterns or made quilts where the majority of the fabric came from a designer’s line. Full disclosure here, I work part time in a couple of delightful quilt shops and have access to fabric at a discount, and at a deeper one if I make something out of the newest stuff so that it gets promoted. A lot of these samples come out great, and few of them have crept onto my pattern covers because the fabric looked good enough for me to show off my design.

All of that said, it’s not always my fave way to go for a bunch of reasons, the first being pure aesthetics. Yes, the line looks good together. No kidding – it was designed to look good together – and this is an appropriate and excellent place for a less confident sewist to get a predictably good result from her precious $$. However, my vision is usually a bead or two left of center. While a line is a great anchor, tweaking it to my sensibility means I begin that thrilling tango of pushing and pulling things in and out of the pile until my guts calm and my soul soars – the signs that I have the color in balance FOR ME. Also, like many fabric artists, I have a stash that reaches back decades. I have bits in said stash that no longer have selvedge identification. And while I once might have bought it thinking “what a lovely design by Big Name of 1993,” I am now in possession of a menopausal memory in all its holey glory. What available ram space I have in my head (the immediate recall space, not the “you know you can look this up” space) is full of more important things like where I left my keys and whether or not I called my folks this week.

I get that designers put a TON of work into making our latest fabric crush. I get that having your name on the selvedge is an important credit – not to mention it must be one heck of a rush to see it there. But isn’t the fact that we are buying it a huge acknowledgement also? Does not say as more than a few words in the unread appendix of a book? And in the internet age, finding out the name of a line/designer and finding the last piece of that one luscious print available on-line has never been easier.

I took a class from a wonderful sculptor some years back, and she told us about helping another artist with the restoration of an angel figure that was in a cemetery. A fellow student asked if she was getting paid and if she would put her name on the arm she remade. Her reply was “Make the art. Just make the art. If it’s good, it will speak more than your signature.”

Just make the art.

What she said – on craft

Posted on by
Reply

Over at Craft Nectar, Weeks Ringle has some very smart things to say about the the importance of craftsmanship regardless of the amount of improv in your design. Motion seconded.

One of the things I’m always saying to my students is get the craft right. Command your rotary cutter. Nail down the 1/4″ seam. Learn to press properly. Once these skills are in your tool box whatever you make will be so much more enjoyable to construct because it will fit and work and flow. When you you don’t have to fight your skills, sewing becomes play. And who doesn’t want to play!