About
It is hard to believe that I have been making quilts, teaching far and wide, writing books on quiltmaking, and designing quilts for magazines, for 30 years . . . and there's no end in sight to the flow of ideas for more pieced designs!
Throughout my career I have taught the idea of 'reach for the unexpected' in each quilt that you make; make it a little bit different than the last ones you have completed in the complexity of design, in the way the design changes as your eye roams across the surface, in the number of colors and/or values you use in a given project. My mantra on color is, 'never use two fabrics when you can use twenty'!!
I've enjoyed exploring a number of quilt design avenues over the years: Strips that Sizzle and Easy Pieces teach students so much about value and color, almost in spite of themselves. The blocks from both of these techniques are made very quickly, and they are so versatile, the challenge is to quit playing with them on the wall, and sew them into a quilt!
I'm known for putting sets of quilt blocks together in innovative but doable ways, and shared how to do it in my 'Smashing Sets for Sampler Blocks' book.
But what I've returned to again and again is 'change the angle' i.e., use the long triangle (half a rectangle, cut corner-to-corner) in your work, which will make you use more angles than the two used in traditional patchwork (90 and 45 degrees, in squares and half-square triangles) in your pieced blocks and quilts. What a refreshing change this makes in the look of patchwork blocks and in new settings for them, It also enables to create undulating curves (even almost perfect circles!), with all straight-line piecing, and perfect sewn points to boot!
In order to do this, I had to come up with templates that would make using the long triangle easy to rotary cut and sew; and thus the AnglePlay™ templates were born! With two books (so far!), a cd of 309 patchwork designs, and a line of patterns already in existence, I feel that I've only scratched the surface of design possibilities, and I hope you will join me in that exploration through this website!