New year, new quilts

Those are the backs of my first batch of quilts for my book! I can’t show you more at this stage, but I don’t think that quick peek gives anything away.

Sending the projects out this morning was bittersweet. About this time last year, I did exactly the same thing, shortly before running smack into the vicissitudes of corporate priorities and staffing. 2012 was a difficult year of hard lessons, dashed hopes, and frustration. I may be starting 2013 the same way I started 2012, but I’m trying to use the wisdom gained from the challenges and put the frustration behind me.

The vast majority of the people I worked with last year were professional and supportive and thoughtful—people I respect, admire, and appreciate. Law of averages dictated that it was time to encounter a bad apple, but bad apples don’t stay on the tree long. I’m glad the people I’m continuing to work with this year are good apples.

The difficulties of 2012 are helping me define my vision for 2013 and clarify what Feed Dog Designs stands for so I won’t again be in the position of having my focus set by external forces with their own agendas. Freelancing will remain a part of my business, but I’m concentrating less on doing whatever I can as a hired gun and more on projects that directly support my own goals and interests. (Forgive me if this sounds like self-helpy managementspeak—what’s a self-employed one-man-show to do?)

I’ve already got some exciting things in the pipeline that I’m looking forward to sharing, but things may remain quiet here on the blog while I finish up the remaining book projects. Regardless of the winding road it took, I think it’ll be a great book, and I hope you’ll love it!

Charley Harper quilts—and Christmas stockings!

It might be a little late to stitch up one of these Charley Harper stockings in time for Christmas, but there’s always next year! The patterns are available from Keri Designs, who, as I was delighted to discover at the Pacific International Quilt Festival, is the official licensed designer for quilt patterns based on the ever-delightful work of Charley Harper.

Keri’s booth was my first stop at the show in October, after spying her quilted version of Harper’s Jumbrella in the show program. Since it was early, I got the chance to chat with the very friendly Keri herself and see the quilts up close.

Harper’s designs are such naturals for adaptation into applique—just look at the way Keri’s used polka dot fabric as the snowy background in Br-r-r-r-rthday, and quilting lines as the rain in Jumbrella. She even cleverly used fabric show-through to create a semi-transparent effect for the wing in Trumpeter Swan.

I’m thrilled that these patterns are available so all of us quilters can make our own little piece of Charley Harper. As for me, I picked up the Ladybug Sampler pattern, which I’m saving for some just-for-fun stitching after I get my book done.

By the way, this is a completely unsponsored plug—I was just so excited to find Charley Harper quilt patterns that I had to share my delight with you too (especially since I once thought the licensing possibility seemed remote). And Keri says there’re more Harper quilt patterns on the way!

Solids in EQ7

It’s been awfully quiet round these parts, mainly because my book and several other projects are keeping me busy, but I wanted to come out of the woodwork to mention a guest post I wrote up for the EQ blog, which went live yesterday.

It’s all about using solid fabrics in EQ7, including converting the built-in solid colors to real solid fabrics produced by various manufacturers. The magic ingredient is a Solid Fabrics library you can download and add to your EQ7 Fabric Library, painstakingly created by yours truly (OK, so I take perverse pleasure in cataloguing and organizing things like that, but it still took quite a bit of time).

The download link was left out when the post went up yesterday, so in the meantime you can download the library from my website. Update: The library file is now uploaded and linked from the EQ blog post, so you can download it direct from there too.

It’s a long post, but if you design in EQ and sew with solid fabrics, I think you’ll really find it helpful!

Lots of squares and a circle

The Winter 2012 issue of Stitch is out, my first as a contributing editor! Three of my projects are in the issue, including the Chequers Throw Quilt above. Since Stitch is a sewing magazine rather than specifically quilting-oriented, the quilts I submit to them are usually fairly simple—things any sewist could make without needing a lot of experience in quiltmaking. This is definitely one of those.

The inspiration for the design came from a wallpaper by Lucienne Day, one of my favorite mid-century pattern designers. The wallpaper was similarly made up of blocks of black, solid color, and more textured designs, which struck me as lending itself very readily to a pieced quilt. Rather than mimicking the textures of the squares in Day’s design (the reference photo I had was too small anyway), I picked fabrics with gridded and crosshatched designs that would echo the piecing pattern (that’s what the text in the magazine should say—a line got dropped from the intro). For such a simple quilt, I’m pleased with how much depth the prints lent.

Clearly I had squares on the brain when I was working on this issue. For this Wool Tiles Pillow, I went for a looser, more freehand look. I always like wool projects that only need bits and pieces, since I can never seem to find yardage of nice wool when I need it.

One of the fun features in this issue is a “Pillow Fight” challenge, for which fellow Stitch contributors Carol Zentgraf and April Moffatt and I each came up with a pillow using fabric designed by Anna Bondoc in the course of a Cloth Paper Scissors series. In the article I describe how I tried to play “fabric whisperer” and let the fabric speak to me—see what it said to the other designers and get patterns for all three pillows and plenty more in the Winter issue of Stitch!

Free pattern: Hexagon pincushion

When I originally posted my hexagon pincushion tutorial, it was with the assumption that you’d use an AccuQuilt die cutter to cut out the fabric. Of course, that’s not to say you couldn’t make it with templates and scissors! To hand out at my quilt guild, I made up some “recipe cards” with illustrated steps on one side and templates on the other.

If you want to make your own hex pincushion, you can download the PDF here and print it either onto a 4×6" index card or 2-up on a single letter page. I’m partial to the index card format myself, but then again, I’m a sucker for anything formatted as an index card. I can’t be the only one…