I’ve been quilting and playing with fabrics for about 6 or 7 years now, and I’ve become obsessed!I love beautiful fabrics, and I especially love cutting them up and rearranging them into something completely new. Bright colors are my M.O.(You should see my house!)

In the fall of 2015, I took a flower collage quilting class at a local quilt shop taught by artist Leslie McNeil. I had chose her pattern “Rocky,” a mountain goat, to try my hand at collaging. I got all the materials, which was a bit overwhelming, and started cutting out hundreds of flowers. During the class, I started putting the flowers together, like a puzzle. I love puzzles, but I’m here to tell you that I was NOT loving this one. I’d stick a piece down, remove it, try a new one, remove it, stick it somewhere else, remove it. I was getting nowhere, and I was getting frustrated.

Finally, I got in a bit of a groove and got the thing done. At the end of the class, I gave all my cut out flowers away to the other students (all that time and fabric)! I said, “I will never do this again!”

See, I don’t like it when I’m not good at something right away. Talk about impatient!

Then I got Rocky home, and I kept looking at him and thinking, “You are gorgeous!”

I know, he’s not so great. In fact, the whole thing is a little plain. But I liked him enough to try another one.

Well, I went out and bought a pattern by artist Laura Heine to give it another try. It was “Paisley Bear.” I worked on it during an art retreat, where I was surrounded by a room full of creative women and inspiration. And it clicked. I got it. How to use the lights and dark to create the look of certain body parts and shading. How to us the flowers’ shapes to make haunches, or a jaw. My Paisley Bear turned out to be stunning! So, since then I’ve made a dozen or so collage quilts — some are Laura Heine’s patterns, and now my own patterns are growing in number.