When I started quilting, it never entered my mind how much time I would spend trying to photograph my quilts. And it really never occurred to me that I would resort to climbing on counter tops and putting myself through all sorts of contortions to get the camera in “just
Whenever I do paintstik demos, someone inevitably asks “how do I clean up?” After playing with these paints for 10 years, I’ve gone through a lot of different cleaning products. Here are my favorites. Cleaning Brushes My favorite cleaning for cleaning brushes depends on how long they sit before I
Once a month I join a small group of adventurous quilters called the DIVAS for a Monday afternoon meeting. We share our recent work, new ideas, work on group projects, and try new techniques. But summer is special in Minnesota, so our August gathering was simply a picnic at Becky’s
The first weekend of August is always special in our little corner of Douglas County (Minnesota). It’s the weekend of the Rose City Threshing Festival. The men bring all their (very large) toys, like steam engines, tractors and threshing machines. They get most of the attention for the weekend, but
Lots of people ask me how to store paintstiks. Just about anything works. You can literally toss them in a zip bag and put them in a drawer. But lots of people want something a bit more “organized.” So here’s a simple, inexpensive idea from the Back-to-School section. I had
A couple of weeks ago, I received the most wonderful letter in the mail. It was a note from artist and teacher Lauren Vlcek (pronounced vel-check), from Colorado Springs. Her letter was accompanied by photographs of two of her journal covers with amazing faces. Here is a paragraph from her
I’ve been working with paintstiks and rubbing plates for almost 10 years. In that time, I’ve almost always overlapped the images and made an overall print on my fabric — much like making a batik. But after making samples from the new Happy Holidays plates, a little idea popped into
I’ve been busy this summer working on a new pattern called Paintstik Patches. It started off to be a holiday quilt, but it’s really more than that, so I changed the name. (I just love being able to do that!) The pattern came back from the printer last week, and
