Cover Girl

I've never been a cover girl before and I guess technically I'm still not, but can I fudge it a little now that my quilt is on the cover of the December/January issue of Quilting Arts Magazine?


See. There are my little twinkle circles.
A couple of months ago the editor, Pokey Bolton, contacted me and asked me if I had any ideas for articles. The first thing that came to mind was to write about the process I use to make my twinkle circles. I've had a lot of folks ask me about this and it's a technique that I've turned to off and on for several years, but recently I've used it a lot on commercial fabric. The technique itself is not new or exclusive to me, but I felt like I had a perspective on it that I wanted to share.


I wrote about the process and included a few examples of finished work. I even got to include some of my process shots. For some strange reason I really liked these photos. Not because they're particularly good images, but rather because they were taken in my dye studio. When I first saw the pictures I called one of my girls over to look at the pictures. "Look,"I said,"in the background you can see our door and, way over in the corner, almost out of the frame, you can make out the handle of that broom we never seem to throw out." No one else in my family got a kick out of these pictures, but I did.
One of the best parts of writing this article was the writing itself. I was frankly taken aback by how much I enjoyed putting pen to paper or more accurately digit to keyboard. I was also a little surprised that I could put together coherent sentences. Having spent the better part of 17 years speaking primarily to children I'm shocked that I didn't describe at least one thing as "so cool" or pepper my text with the word "freaking".
Another amazing highlight was finding out that my quilt was going to be on the cover. When I went to quilt festival in Houston, I stopped by the Quilting Arts booth. I knew I would get a chance to see a copy of Stitch and I thought I might have an opportunity to meet some of the folks who worked on the magazine. Thankfully they were all wearing name tags, so I approached Pokey Bolton, introduced myself and was very warmly greeted. Then she told me the big news. I was floored. It has taken the most amazing amount of willpower not to talk about it, but once my copies came in the mail I knew that the magazine would be on the newsstands very soon.


I won't deny that I'm prone to hyperbole but this is...so freaking cool!