I love fabric and color. I enjoy using fabric the way a painter might use paint to explore different combinations of color and the emotions they might awaken in the viewer. Why use one red when five or even ten reds would create a more interesting visual design? Even after 20 years, the possibilities of fabric and thread still seem limitless to me; there is always some new avenue to explore. Fiber art is exciting because it offers a tactile quality beyond the color and line of a design. The process of quilting the layers together allows me to draw with a needle and thread and add another dimension to the piece. As an art quilter, I seek to be true to the past while creating contemporary quilted designs that have a strong visual impact.

I come from a long line of women who have expressed themselves using a needle and thread. Creating with various forms of fabric and thread has been a part of my life since I was a child and my mother and my great aunt taught me to sew and embroider. Once I discovered quilting in the early 1980’s, it became my passion. My early work explored traditional patterns and methods and this experience cemented the vocabulary I would later use to make nontraditional art quilts. Making art quilts is thrilling because I never know what the design is going to look like until the piece is finished. Typically I start with a fabric I love or a design idea, like free form circles or diagonal bands of color. Then I decide on a color scheme and pull many different fabrics together to begin cutting and auditioning pieces on the design wall in my studio. Usually I put all of the pieces up on the wall and rearrange them until I’m satisfied before I start sewing. Very often the initial design idea is only faintly recognizable at the end because the choices of fabric, color and design interact in unexpected ways as the piece emerges.