July 1, 2013 Podcast
Guest: Kaari Meng of French General
Topics: designing fabric
She says: "I usually start with a scrap of fabric, probably something that I found at a flea market in the south of France last summer. Through that one little piece, I start a theme. For example, for the Josephine collection, I found a piece of fabric that I thought looked like something that could have been in her home. What else would Josephine have had in her home?"
Guest: Jan Patek
Topics: designing quilts
She says: "It's the round versus the geometric. I like the tension between the two. I think it's boring if it's all one or the other. Somebody once said, 'You're very asymmetrical.' I have been trying to get my life to line up for 69 years, and it hasn't done it yet. That's not the kind of quilts I do."
Guest: Shara Meredith of Basic Grey
Topics: designing fabric
She says: "Rachel, who is the owner, oversees the art direction. She loves vintage books, anything old, and she literally will scan stuff in or find images online and recreate them and alter them. And then they get converted, and we increase the pattern sizes or scale them down to make it work on the fabric."
Guest: Carolyn Forster
Topics: quilt piecing tips, embroidery tips
She says: "If you look at your needle and if the shaft of the needle if fatter than the thread doubled through it, you'll be fine because everything will just follow through, whereas if you find you've threaded your needle but you're having to tug your thread, it's because the shaft of your needle is too narrow."