I learned how to quilt in a class given by a woman who did everything by hand.  My son was five then.  Now he is close to forty and I am still quilting…doing my own thing.  I now work with a sewing machine and by hand.  I have been designing appliquéd realistic animals since 1989 when I couldn’t find any I wanted to make.  I started out with machine appliqué (satin stitching) and added raw edge appliqué.   Now I felt my appliqués, and I am working them on wool fabric.  Felting is created by pushing wool fibers into background fabrics.  Simple enough, right?  The fun happens when you realize that you can actually draw with the fiber colors by blending them in your hands.  The other appeal to me is that felting is so portable.  I prepare my appliqués at home by cutting them out and fusing them to the backgrounds, and then I can take a road trip (DH insists on driving) and felt and embroider for hours.

I studied Fabric Design in college.  Quilting is just another area of my focused interest on textiles.  I can play with curved lines (my realistic animal appliqués) and forget about the perfection that is required with traditional piecing.  I invented my methods because I found that I couldn’t make similar sized finished blocks to save my life.  Most of my quilts have different sized blocks that go together by adding strips of fabric to fill in where two blocks are not the same length.  This is great for all the people who can’t figure out the math of a quilt.  When my quilts are big enough, I put a border on them and quilt them.  The only math I use is when measuring the quilt to make sure it is square before I put on the binding.

There are 75 animal themed patterns on my website:  www.critterpat.com as well as some supplies needed for this project.  Follow me as I muse about the design process on my blog:  http://critterpat.blogspot.com   Sign up for our newsletter (at the bottom of our home page) to find out which shows we will be attending as vendors, and to be advised of what’s new.