July 18, 2016 Podcast
Guest: Stacy lest Hsu
Topics: designing fabric
She says: "Spoonflower had contests on a weekly basis. And one of them was for stuffed toys. I submitted a design with a doll...My whole goal was to design something that somebody could make in a day, someone could do it so easily. We're all busy and I wanted to create something beautiful that you didn't have to go to the store and pick out all the different fabrics and all the different yarns for the embroidery. It's all there, ready to go. You can sew it up and you can still say that you made it yourself."
Guest: Debbie Maddy
Topics: fabric selection
She says: "If you use smaller prints you will have more success with your seams disappearing. If you have a really large print with really large flowers, when you cut that in half for two half square triangles, you are going to have a line there where it's going to appear to be a seam. But if you have a little smaller print, or solids, or small directional prints then the busyness of it, along with the quilting across the seam, will make the seam disappear."
Guest: Mary Abreu
Topics: Row by Row Experience
She says: "We enjoy meeting people who come into the shop and being a part of something that really does attract so many people and such a diverse group of people from all over. Part of when you work in a retail environment like this, where there is so much emotion and so much connection with quilting and sewing, you are just constantly feeding off the energy and just enjoying the interactions."
Guest: Shruti Dandekar
Topics: portrait quilts
She says: "My husband's family owns a business that just completed one hundred years, so I wanted to gift them something. So that was when I decided to make a portrait of [my husband's great-grandfather], who was the founder of the family business. So I started working on that quilt and nobody knew about it. So I was going along at my pace and I was very happy about it...And I was so scared that it would end up looking like someone else that I stopped working on it for awhile. That quilt actually changed my life. Everyone started taking my quilting more seriously than an expensive hobby as they used to think it is. And even I started thinking about my own work more seriously."