Shelly Stokes from Cedar Canyon Textiles is a talented fabric artist, and she put her talent and skills to good use when she made a stunning bag using the Urban Computer Satchel pattern. Find out more about some changes Shelly made to the pattern, plus the process she used to customize the …
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The Skunk Tale Continues
The Rest of the Story I've heard from a lot of you who want to find out what happened to the baby skunks I rescued last month from the window well outside my pattern design studio. Here's the rest of the story. When I wrote the last post, it had been five days since I had moved the baby skunks …
The Scrappy Sampler: A Retired Quilt Pattern Gets New Life
This is the story about how I designed my first quilt pattern, the Scrappy Sampler, and how many years and many pattern designs later, it was taken out of retirement and reborn. How my career in quilt and bag design began In the early 1990’s my friend Brenda Dolbear invited me to join a quilting …
A Little Surprise Outside the Studio Window
A Normal Day at Work Gets Interesting I work in a basement studio. Every now and then, after a rain, toads hop into my two window wells and get stuck there. I usually realize this because I can hear them climbing the window screen to escape. They make a kind of scratchy noise. What was that …
Out of the Design Studio and Into the Garden
There's more to life than sewing and quilting (shocking!) and it's the time of year here in Southwestern Ontario to get out in the garden and make it pretty for summer. I’ve been spending a bit of time there these past two weekends with my wheelbarrow, bags of mulch, hoe, rake and shovel. We’ve …
What Happens When Brenda Comes to Visit
A Taste of The Guest Teacher Experience I spend much of my time designing patterns, but I also offer services to quilt shops. None of these services is more hands-on than visiting shops to present my trunk show, lecture and teach classes. This little vignette is intended to give you a taste …