She designs her Ponderosa Creative Thread Gloss with both the environment and quilters in mind – creating scents for quilters while designing a product that has a low impact on the environment. She also creates hand-sewn goods, and has a great sense of style.

Some quick details about Paige: scorpio, neurodivergent, mother, wife, enneagram 5w6 (investigator-loyalist), and in between meyers-briggs ENTP (visionary) and INTP (logician).

Show Notes:

Read all About Thread Gloss
Shop in the Ponderosa Creative shop
Get Ponderosa Creative Thread Gloss here (including the new Y2K scent)
Find Ponderosa Creative on Instgram
Check out all of Paige’s Quilt Patterns here

Listen to the Episode Here:

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Transcript of the Episode:

Carolina Moore:
I love notions and I’m guessing that you do too. Hey there friend. It’s Carolina Moore, your favorite sewing and quilting YouTuber and now podcaster here with another episode.
Hey there quilting friends. It’s Carolina Moore and I’m here for our last episode of this season one of I Love Notions. And I have a special guest today. This is Paige Anderson of Ponderosa Creative. And I’m going to let her tell you all about what she does. Welcome to the podcast, Paige.

Paige:
Hi. Thank you so much for having me, Carolina. For everyone listening, hi. I am Paige Anderson. I own and operate Ponderosa Creative, which I started in 2017. We are, myself and my team, so if you hear me say we it’s a couple of people now. But we are a needlework supply and quilty good company. And our bestseller which we’re going to be talking about a lot today, is Ponderosa thread gloss?

Carolina Moore:
Yes, it’s your thread gloss that is how I actually discovered you. But before we hop into that, I want to hear about your quilty origin story. What was the beginning of you and fabric?

Paige:
As far back as I can remember, fabric has been a part of my life. When I was growing up, I spent most of my time with my grandparents and especially my grandmother who was a major, major quilter. She actually passed away earlier this year, so I’m a little sad about that. She is my origin story, she was a quilter. She owned a kite store actually in the 90s. And-

Carolina Moore:
What’s a kite store?

Paige:
She made kites and brought in kites from other manufacturers, and this was on the Oregon coast where it’s windy and people just come there to fly kites. So the-

Carolina Moore:
So like the fancy dragon ones and all different designs and shapes or the box shaped ones or?

Paige:
I have no idea what they looked like. I don’t remember, that was 30 years ago when I was a little kid. But I remember one kite that she kept from after she stopped running a sewing based business is your typical diamond shaped kite. And it had a palm tree and a dinosaur and these really fluttery tales. And I had that for most of my childhood and I loved to take it to the coast or to the park and be like, “My grandma made this. My grandma teaches me how to sew.” So I spent so much of my childhood at her feet picking with her scraps, learning how to sew. And because sewing was so important to her, it was really important for her to teach me as much as she could about sewing with… Especially because home ec isn’t taught in schools anymore.
And her being a kid of the 50s was like, “Girl, you need to know how to sew. You need to know how to alter your own clothes. Do a basic quilt block, learn how to put these layers together, know how to embroider at bare minimum your clothes and pillow cases.” So I learned all that from her. And I was a really nerdy little kid, so I just spent time with my grandma and did crafts most of the time. So that’s where it started.

Carolina Moore:
That’s so much fun. Okay.

Paige:
It really was. I look back on it so fondly.

Carolina Moore:
So at some point you made the jump from being the kid who’s playing with scraps on grandma’s sewing floor to being the human who starts a quilty business.

Paige:
Yeah. So I kept crafting, kept doing sewing, quilting, embroidery, anything with fabric that I could really get my hands on for years and years. Set it down for a couple of years as an adolescent because I was just way too cool and I’d rather watch boys at the skate park than quilt, but that didn’t last. And I came back to quilting and embroidery, hand embroidery in a really big way when I was in college. I was at university and it’s so stressful to go to college, my gosh, never doing that again. But I needed an outlet again. So I started making stuff and I started making so many embroideries and quilted pouches that I needed to do something with them. And my family and friends were just like, “Please stop. We have too many. We love you, but that’s enough.” And so they were like, “Why don’t you give an Etsy shop or sell on eBay?” Because this was… Let me think where we’re at in the timeline, 2013.
So Etsy was just starting to become popular. So I signed up and I put a series of Kurt Vonnegut themed embroideries. And kind of alternatives to the live, laugh, love style like sassy embroideries up on Etsy and they sold. And that was enough encouragement while I was in college to be like, okay, maybe this degree that I’m pursuing, maybe a career in the sciences isn’t my only option. I have something else here and it brings me a lot of joy. So I just kept doing that on the side. Started doing a few craft markets here and there. And then flash forward to 2016, I was in grad school and I had moved cities and I was working on my master’s degree. And just for context, my degrees are in environmental studies. So just very stressful, very important but just you can’t have a degree like that in that sort of field with climate change happening and not have a super rewarding outlet.
And then I just started spending more and more of my time being creative. And then it became like I had a government job in stormwater education and that was fun and fulfilling. But then my Etsy store started to grow and grow to where it kind of was distracting me from my homework. So I knew it was going to be a really big part of my life. And then 2017 I had my daughter, I was out of work for a little bit and I started quilting again. And this time I knew, oh, wait a second, this is actually what I’m supposed to be doing. This is what I’m called to do. I love the environment but maybe a career and it isn’t for me. And I didn’t let that thought fully sink in until about six months ago when I went actual full-time with art and quit the environmental field.
But at the time in 2017, I was home with my daughter and we lived in this tiny, tiny 700 square foot, maybe 800 square foot craftsman house. So I rented out a room in a downtown art space above a bar in the little town I was living in during grad school and started quilting and started selling those quilted goods. And then I started writing quilt patterns because I was like, well, I really want to do something different than the quilts I’m seeing. And so I started doing that and people showed interest and I was like, I guess, yes, sure, let’s write quilt patterns. And did that for a couple of years until the birth of thread gloss which kind of changed everything, and that was in 2018.

Carolina Moore:
So what was the birth of thread gloss or what was even the gestation before the birth of thread gloss?

Paige:
Yeah, so at the time I was like, oh, this isn’t going to be a big deal. This isn’t going to change my life, change my career trajectory. But I was preparing to teach a series of hand embroidery workshops in Olympia, Washington where I live currently. And I was going to teach some simple tactile and flowers, and I have always used thread conditioner. And the one that I had been using since I was a child and my grandma was like, “This is the holy grail. You’re never using anything else.” That company had gone under and it was like the one in the little blue box, I can’t even remember what it’s called anymore but they went out of business. So I kept trying any other thread conditioner on the market that I could get my hands on and I didn’t love any of them. But me as an ultra impatient person I cannot deal with thread that tangles, I can’t do it. I’ll put down what I’m doing. I will abandon a project if my thread tangles. So I need a thread conditioner.

Carolina Moore:
So let’s back up a second. So first of all, I think the brand that you’re talking about that went under that was in a little blue box was Thread Heaven.

Paige:
Oh, I think so. [inaudible 00:10:15].

Carolina Moore:
It was a blue box with gold writing on it.

Paige:
Yes. Yeah, and it was kind of like a whimsical font, kind of like wizard.

Carolina Moore:
Yes. And for people who aren’t familiar with thread gloss or thread conditioner, what is it? What does it do? Why do we need it in our lives?

Paige:
Right. So the reason that I found it to be a product that I could absolutely not live without in my stitchy life is because it’s a thread conditioner that coats the thread that you’re working with to prevent tangles, fraying and brittleness. You could kind of think about it as a deep conditioner for your thread and embroidery floss.

Carolina Moore:
So kind of like conditioner makes our hair easier to comb or to brush.

Paige:
Absolutely.

Carolina Moore:
Thread conditioner makes the thread easier to pull through the fabric.

Paige:
Yes.

Carolina Moore:
Perfect. Okay. So the thread conditioner that you grew up with wasn’t around anymore. This is devastating. You started trying some other brands, didn’t find anything that you loved.

Paige:
Yeah, there’s so many great brands out there and just like with hair conditioner, folks have different preferences about what kind of consistency or ingredients that they want to do. So I just wasn’t finding anything for me. I wanted something made with coconut oil and bees wax, something all natural, something that smelt good but not in a overwhelming walking into Yankee Candle sort of way. I wanted something that was made on my side of the country and at the time I couldn’t find anything that I liked. So I had a pal that was a lip balm manufacturer and I just offhandedly mentioned that, “Hey, I’m trying to source stuff for this embroidery workshop and for my personal life and I’m really stumped on this problem.” She’s like, “Why don’t we just make some? Why don’t we figure it out?” So we work together on a formula and came up with Ponderosa thread gloss, and it was exactly what I imagined. It’s creamy yet a more hard texture than say the petroleum-based products that are on the market, which are fine if that’s what you’re into. But I was able to find bees wax locally, find organic fair trade coconut oil and create a consistency that I really liked. And so then we started out with three flagship scents. One was hippie blend which we still carry and it’s just frankincense. It smells like walking into a co-op in the Pacific Northwest. It’s amazing. Vacay blend, which is coconut. And then we had a no frills blend, which used bleach beeswax.
We don’t have that anymore, instead we have a natural blend which is just regular old bees wax and coconut oil. And smells like whatever flower the bees were working on when that wax was made. So we started out with those three and then I took them to the embroidery classes and I put them in kits. And people just kind freaked out in the best way possible of like, “Oh, I didn’t know I needed this. How can I get more and how can I get this for my friends?” I was like um… And there I was, a new mom, kind of broke in my early 20s kind of looking for something else in life, some sort of mission outside of my work in the environmental field. And I was like, oh, maybe this could be a thing. And it was almost like I didn’t have a choice in the matter that the people have spoken and they needed a thread conditioner that was made the way I make it. That’s all natural, creamy, scents aren’t totally in your face. They reflect nostalgia, they reflect amazing places in the Pacific Northwest especially.
And then it kind of blossomed from there. I just started making more and I took the production in-house and started making it for myself, my husband and I. And we’ve had various employees along the way now that we distribute to several different countries and over 50 different quilt shops and craft stores.

Carolina Moore:
That’s incredible.

Paige:
So yeah, I guess the rest is history.

Carolina Moore:
So thread gloss is a thing that for quilters who haven’t used it before, we don’t know. We didn’t know that we needed it until we knew that we needed it. And also it sounds like that’s the story of thread gloss in your business, is that you didn’t know how it was going to revolutionize your business until it showed up.

Paige:
Yeah, I didn’t realize that the major barrier that I had to finishing projects which was if my thread tangles I’m going to abandon this and not do it because this is supposed to be fun, I need to realize that so many people deal with that, whether it’s hand quilting, embroidery, book binding, beading, people use thread gloss for all sorts of stuff. I didn’t realize that dealing with pesky thread was such a barrier to having fun. And then being able to provide that for people I was like, “Hey, let’s make this fun again. Let’s take the hassle out of needle work so that you could just have a good time and maybe have some aromatherapy while you’re at it.” So it got popular.

Carolina Moore:
Yeah. Now you have more than just those original three scents now, right?

Paige:
Yeah, we have 15 right now plus custom blends that different stores have ordered for their in-house blend that they only carry. And next month we are coming out with a brand new one as well.

Carolina Moore:
So we’re recording this in August, this will come out the 19th of September. Will it be out already by then?

Paige:
Yes. Yes, it will. So do you want to hear about it?

Carolina Moore:
Yes, please.

Paige:
Okay. So the next blend is one I’ve been working on formulating for quite a while now, it’s called Y2K blend. And it is very cucumber melon forward that has a little bit of hint of jasmine and chamomile to balance it out as well. And I don’t know about you, but I was a cucumber melon girly in middle school. [inaudible 00:17:17] happening, the colorful IMAX were out, flip phones were still cool, Britney Spears was on the radio and everything I had was scented like cucumber melon. It really smells like that transition to me of going from watching Pokemon after school to getting really into MTV and learning how to use a hair straightener and learning about who you are in the world. So that’s what that scent means to me, and I hope that it resonates with a bunch of other Y2K middle schoolers like myself.

Carolina Moore:
That’s so funny. I can smell it. I’m a little bit older than you are, and I have the feeling that I’ve got listeners that are a little bit older than we are as well. But it’s so fun how scents are… We don’t think about how much sense are tied to memories and to feelings and emotions. When you’re talking about the scent of that time, that transition time, when I was a freshman in college I picked up the Bath and Body works they had a peach lotion. And I loved the smell of these peaches. And of course they discontinued it later. And so now whenever I find anything peach, I have to smell it and say, “Is this the same peach?” Because when I find something that’s that same peach and I can’t tell you what’s wrong about other peaches. I’ll be like, no, this is not that peach. But when I find that peach it’s like, oh, there’s that smell and it brings me right back to that time.

Paige:
Yeah, scent memory is so specific and so amazing. My gosh, I need to talk to a scientist or psychologist about this because I really believe that if you select a scent and not just for thread gloss and for crafting, but in your life that reminds you of a good time, you will have a good time. There’s something about it. And I believe that with thread gloss, and I really choose from my own experiences and I hope that people at least find them somewhat relatable or enjoy the scents. But because crafting, embroidery, quilting, all of this it’s so often passed down from generation to generation or between friends, it’s very community based, that I hope that memory gets attached to that too. Whether it’s you’re smelling this thread gloss and it brings you back to a memory that you really love of creating something or just any time in your life that means a lot to you.
Or the scent creates new memories, say you’re with your pals at a brewery stitching and then that scent that you’re using becomes the signifier for that memory. That’s part of why I do what I do and why I work so hard to curate scents that I don’t quite see elsewhere is because scent is important. Scent is identity, it’s memory. It becomes… I don’t know. I know it’s just a quilting notion but it becomes important.

Carolina Moore:
I love this extra layer on scent and it’s making me think about all the things. There are certain stores that will bake chocolate chip cookies because they want the store to smell like home. And that smell of coming into chocolate chip cookies for so many of us is a home or homey sense.

Paige:
Yeah.

Carolina Moore:
So some real estate agents will do that. I remember when we were selling our house years and years ago, our realtor she had a bread maker that she would lend us. But I had a bread maker and I didn’t need hers. But for clients that didn’t have one she would lend them a bread maker and she would get the boxed bread mix so that all of the person had to do was dump the bread mix in and add water. And they were supposed to start that a certain amount of time before the open house started so that it would go through its whole kneading cycle and then it would start baking as the open house was starting so that the house would smell fresh baked bread, because that’s another one of those scents of home and comfort. Even if you didn’t grow up in a house where your family baked bread for so many of us, that scent of homemade fresh baked bread it smells like home.
So you want in real estate for people to come into your home and go, oh, it feels like home because it smells so homey.

Paige:
Oh, I could picture myself here. Yeah, totally, scent is wildly important.

Carolina Moore:
Okay, so you have the scents, you’ve got a new one that’s just come out which I will definitely link to in the show notes and people can find that new scent. But thread gloss isn’t the only thing that you… It’s a big part of your business but it’s not the only part of your business, right?

Paige:
No.

Carolina Moore:
So what other things are you working on?

Paige:
Well, Ponderosa just got picked up by Checker Distributors, so we have been-

Carolina Moore:
Congratulations.

Paige:
Happy busy with… Thank you.

Carolina Moore:
So for people who don’t know what that means, so for those of us who make notions, we can sell them directly to quilt shops or it’s actually about four main distributors here in the US that you can sell your product to the distributor, and then the distributor sells to bunches and a bunches of quilt shops. So it makes it easier to get into more shops when you get picked up by a distributor. And Checker is one of the largest distributors. So getting picked up by Checker for a notion designer is a big deal, so congratulations.

Paige:
Thank you. And what I love most about it is it makes it easier for quilt shops to take a gamble in these uncertain times on a product they’ve never tried before. And then of course figure out whether or not it works for them, because when you shop through a distributor your minimum is typically lower and you could shop from many different brands to hit that minimum. Whereas when folks shop directly from me for wholesale, your entire minimum is just thread gloss. So it gives an opportunity to the quilt stores to try new things and that’s why I’m most stoked about Checker. But yeah, since we’ve gotten on board with them, it has been crazy busy. And we are also producing an exclusive blend of thread gloss for a company in Australia for a super secret project that I can’t go into more detail about, but stay tuned. I’ll announce that on Instagram. And doing custom blends for other stores. But other than that, the other main projects that I’ve been working on there’s two. I have been revamping my sown goods collection.
So if you guys know me or if you want to go take a look at my portfolio, at least that’s how I use Instagram these days as a portfolio of like here’s what I’m working on and these are the things that I like. This is what I find inspiration from. So if you go and you see, I’m really, really into improv landscape ish curves in quilting. So for a few years now I’ve been creating these quilted bags and selling them at maker’s markets, sometimes on my own website but mostly a wholesale to other boutiques across the country. And so that’s the major thing that I’m doing right now because we’re recording this in August, you’ll hear in September. Other small businesses will know it is now fully like Christmas crunch time, so lots of sewing curves lately. And I have been obsessed with the color blue, all shades of blue, blue everything. So a lot of blue fabric in my life right now. The other thing that I have been working on is applying for artists residencies and creating wall hangings, trying to… Well, let me add some contexts there.
I have focused so heavily on quilted bags, mini pouches, pencil pouches and some larger ones. There’s a couple of different sizes because for people that don’t quilt, it’s really inaccessible to buy quilted work because it is very labor-intensive. The supplies are expensive. If a quilt is priced how it should be, it’s hundreds or thousands of dollars. And that’s not something that everyday people can necessarily have in their home, but they can manage to have a quilted pouch. And quilting I think should belong to everyone and be accessible to everyone. So that’s why I started making quilted accessories because I was like, well, let’s have small bits of that coziness, that nostalgia, that craftsmanship of quilting that you could just carry around with you wherever you go because also you can’t carry around like a queen size quilt. You could, but a pencil pouch might be a little bit more socially acceptable. So I started doing that which I love, and I’m never going to stop doing it, I don’t think because it just brings me so much joy to create a variety of different little landscape pouches.
But I have been really craving a more artistic side, doing one-off wall hanging pizzas and trying to get those in the galleries. It’s something I did before in before times, so early 2020. And before that I had some gallery work and some wall hangings, and I have been brainstorming ways to get into that. And when I get a second here and there kind of experimenting with different colors, shapes, textures, trying to think about quilting in a less utilitarian sense of the craft because I’ve got notions which are supplies, consumables, they’re meant to be used. And then my line of some goods that is accessible relatively at a lower price on the end of consumer purchases in the art world. But I’m still finding that there’s this long history of textile art being kind of cast aside as women’s work or not real art or the argument between what is art and what is craft.
And I’m always drawn back to the idea of we need to change people’s mind about that. Art isn’t just the things you typically see in galleries, photography, painting, things like that. It could be quilts too. Why aren’t quilts in galleries as often? Why are we so siloed into just having-

Carolina Moore:
Quilt museums, yeah.

Paige:
Yeah, quilt museums or quilt shows and we’re only showing quilts to other quilters, which is fine and dandy and amazing. But I want to expand the reach of quilting because color and shape and texture it’s universal, and textiles are all around us and they mean the world to everyone. Everyone uses textiles. So I’ve been trying to kind of make smart pieces and we’ll see where that goes.

Carolina Moore:
Well, that sounds amazing and super fun as well. You mentioned something about looking at residencies. What does that look like?

Paige:
Well, I’m not sure yet. I kind of want to relocate and checking out different places through the form of say, going for a week or a month or longer to a different part of the country. And gaining inspiration from the surroundings there and learning about different communities might give some sort of indication of where to go next as an Anderson, where the Anderson’s going to go next, what are we going to do? We’ve lived in Washington our whole lives. We’ve lived in Olympia eight years, what’s the big next thing? And so I kind of want to travel by doing residencies, but right now that’s kind of like a let’s see kind of thing. I really want to apply to a few in the Southwest because I’m so drawn to the colors and textures and sense of the Southwest. And I went to New Mexico a couple of months ago and it’s all I can think about. It is my whole personality now.

Carolina Moore:
So the name is Ponderosa Creative and Ponderosa makes me think of Southwest, is that where that came from or where did the name Ponderosa come from?

Paige:
Kind of. So let me tell you the story. So I really started thinking about the art that I do and all of that seriously when I was in grad school. And I was working on my candidacy for my master’s degree, I was writing a case study on the species migration of Ponderosa pines. And how different agencies are sampling the stock of Ponderosa pines which means the seedlings, the pine cones from the Southwest and then translating those, transporting them, transplanting all the different ways you could think about it, into the Pacific Northwest and the inland Northwest because the variations of Ponderosa pine in the Southwest are more resistant to drought and fire which we are seeing a lot more of up here. So I wrote a big paper on that and it really struck me as a metaphor for who I was and what I was going through in my life of you could be the same thing but go somewhere else, do something else, be something else and there’s a place for you.
Just like what botanists are trying to do with Ponderosas and other climate resistant species of how could we use our resources to get by and be resilient. And in grad school I was really into… Still am, really into the concept of socio ecological resilience, which means in the face of climate change how could we make sure that we get through it? And as people in a community how do we become resilient? And for me, I just kept coming back to art. Art is how people are resilient. So I felt really inspired by this tree and I was just like, well, let me just borrow that for my name. And so to me Ponderosa really represents creativity and resilience and kind of just blooming where you’re planted.

Carolina Moore:
That’s awesome. So what do you have in the future? What are you looking towards next? We’re looking at residencies and doing more art like quilt projects. Any other products or tools or classes? I saw you have a fabric dyeing class on your site.

Paige:
I did. I actually just did that last Saturday, which was August 12th. I did a botanical Sano type botanical imprint course, and it was so much fun. I am feeling pretty open-ended with what the future holds, whether that’s getting more into teaching, doing patterns again, I’m not sure, expanding the lines of notion, creating more artwork. We live in this whole new era economically and as people coming out of the other side of the pandemic where we have to reevaluate everything, does this bring us joy? Does this bring us security? Does this bring joy to others? So I’m in that process of trying to figure out all this stuff brings me joy, but which one’s best? So that being said, I did recently introduce a couple of more notions into my shop that are made by other manufacturers. But trying to get Ponderosa to be like a one-stop shop in progress for needlework supplies, like I have some scissors, I have some thimbles, I have some other little tools and notions, measuring tapes, some stickers for some machine or for whatever, some seam rippers.
So I’ve started dipping my toes into more notions because I do have this other big, scary, exciting back burner dream of a decade from now having a brick and mortar quilt shop. So I’m like, well-

Carolina Moore:
Oh, that’s exciting.

Paige:
Why not start now and have a couple of fabric bundles, carry some cute scissors and see what the response is? And not just be a one trick pony with the thread gloss. While that is great, there’s so much more to the quilt averse.

Carolina Moore:
So where can people find you? You talked about your online shop a little bit. So where can people find your shop and where else can they find you online and on social media?

Paige:
So I am most active on social media on Instagram, and recently on Threads. It was really fun. It has a Tumblr vibe to it. My handle is Ponderosa creative on both. And if you want to try out some thread gloss or check out the other notions and quilt patterns that I have in my shop, you could find that @ponderosacreative.com. Or if you’re in the Etsy app, you could search Ponderosa Creative and find me there. And if you are a quilt shop, boutique, Advent calendar specialist, anyone that buys notions, you could find Ponderosa thread gloss on fair @ponderosacreative.fair.com is my direct link or you could always email me for it. Or you could go through Checker Distributors. You just search for Ponderosa thread gloss.

Carolina Moore:
Perfect. I’ll make sure that all those links are in the show notes as well, so people can easily just go to Ilovenotions.com and find this episode and then all the links will be there, including actually a transcript of the episodes. I make sure to transcribe all the episodes so that we have accessibility for people who audio either isn’t their thing or it can’t be their thing because they have challenges with audio. So we have it in both ways.

Paige:
I love that, yes.

Carolina Moore:
Yeah. One of my favorite things about notions is that it makes quilting and sewing more accessible for people, sample your thread gloss. And it takes that frustration of knot at threads away so that you’re able to truly enjoy what you do. And there’s so many ways that you can come at these creative hobbies in the way that works best for you, things that make it more adaptable or accessible. And so I want to do the same obviously with the podcast as well, and have it as accessible for folks as well.

Paige:
I love that so much.

Carolina Moore:
Thank you.

Paige:
I’m over the moon about being part of that. Thank you so much for having me,

Carolina Moore:
Paige, you’ve been such a great guest. Make sure y’all go to Ilovenotions.com to find all the links to follow Paige in all the places. And to be able to get your hands on some of her fabulous thread gloss and get those wonderful smells into your life. I did mention that this is the final episode for this season. However, I do have one bonus episode coming up, so make sure you stay tuned for that. And Paige, thanks so much for joining us.

Paige:
Thanks for having me.

Carolina Moore:
Friends, that’s our episode for today. I hope you loved it as much as I loved having this conversation. Remember that you can find all the details that we talked about in the show notes, and those are all @ilovenotions.com. And make sure to leave this podcast a review in your favorite podcasting app. Leaving it a review will help the podcast algorithm show this podcast to other people who love notions just as much as we do. Friends, that’s all I have for you today, but I will see you right here real soon. Bye for now.

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Her first career was as a high school teacher, and she now uses those skills in the quilting world. And, she didn’t stop there. When creating her block of the month “A Little Bit Different” she created an acrylic template to make the process easier.

Learn more about this trailblazing quilter in this episode of I Love Notions.

Show Notes:

Visit the True Blue Quilts Website
Find the “Long Dash” Churn Dash here
Check out the Little Bit Different Stretched Star here
Find the Little Bit Different Ruler on the True Blue Quilts Website
Check out the Little Bit Different Block of the Month
Find True Blue Quilts on Youtube here
True Blue quilts on Instagram and on Facebook

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Carolina Moore:
I love notions and I’m guessing that you do too. Hey there friend. It’s Carolina Moore, your favorite sewing and quilting YouTuber, and now podcaster here with another episode.
Today’s guest is Andi Stanfield of True Blue Quilts, and I really want you to get to know her by having her introduce herself. So Andi, welcome to the podcast and please introduce yourself.

Andi Stanfield:
Thanks, Carolina. Great to be here. I am Andi Stanfield and I live in Phoenix, Arizona, and I followed in my mom’s footsteps into this world of quilting because she opened a fabric and yarn store in the early two thousands as a retirement project. She thought it might be interesting, and I followed along and helped her out while the shop was open and just fell in love with everything about it. I started making quilts. I bought a long arm. I just went head over heels and I continued to teach high school during the day and worked at the shop on nights and weekends, and she has since sold her business and encouraged me to pursue other avenues in the quilt world, whether that is teaching or designing patterns, which I love.
So that’s it in a nutshell. True Blue Quilts really emerged in about 2015 when my mom and I published a book about monochromatic quilts, so it ties in with that True Blue Quilts name and we explored a bunch of different color options just focusing on one color family for each quilt. So that’s been a lot of fun and she feeds me a lot of ideas. So it’s been a wonderful working relationship over the years.

Carolina Moore:
So you’re really a second generation quilter and second generation quilting business owner in your family?

Andi Stanfield:
Yes, actually, yeah, she probably wouldn’t see herself quite as that trailblazer, but she really did provide a wonderful example for me and it’s always a delight to collaborate with her. Obviously, there were some other quilters and sowers in our family going back through the years. We have a wonderful family heirloom quilt that her aunts I believe, or great aunts, I’d have to look at the label again to double check, but they started some blocks for her uncle in the 1940s, and then once he found out she started quilting, he sent her all the blocks because they hadn’t been finished. So they’re these beautiful red work Americana blocks that she set with modern fabric, and we have this wonderful historic quilt that has been worked on by several generations of our family.

Carolina Moore:
Oh, that’s incredible. What a precious heirloom that you have.

Andi Stanfield:
Yeah, the stories are so fun and obviously with modern technology, she was able to take a picture of the original packaging and tell the whole story, and so we have that printed label on the back and so yeah, it’ll be a wonderful treasure for hopefully for future generations as well.

Carolina Moore:
Oh, absolutely. That’s incredible. I love that.
So my other question, you started out by working in a quilt shop. Did that make you think, “Oh yes, I want to be a quilt shop owner when I grow up,” or, “Oh, this is really a lot of work. Maybe being a quilt shop owner is not what I wanted to do when I grew up.”

Andi Stanfield:
The problems with the brick and mortar things, and I think a lot of quilters that love the industry so much, they get those stars in their eyes like, oh, I could just do this all day, but a quilt shop owner is doing the business stuff and not the quilting stuff. So yeah, you definitely see how much goes on behind the scenes and how little quilting time those owners actually have. So yes, I’m quite happy to just be the teacher that comes in a couple days a week and not the person in charge of everything.

Carolina Moore:
Yes, quilt shops are a national treasure and their owners should be protected at all costs because we need our quilt shops, but there’s a lot of hats that a quilt shop owner wears for sure.

Andi Stanfield:
Yes, yes.

Carolina Moore:
So you were basically born into quilting. Did you love quilting or was it something that you fought against a little bit? Did you start it when you were younger and then leave and go do something else and then come back? What does that story look like?

Andi Stanfield:
Yeah, it actually is very much an adult hobby for both my mom and I. She sewed all my clothes, well, maybe not all, but she sewed quite a bit when I was a young child. But I think she was very aware of the dynamics and did not ever push me or try to teach me. I think we would’ve butted heads if I had learned to use a sewing machine with her at an age earlier than 35, which is when I started. So she did make one quilt for me when I was about seven or eight years old, and I still have that. So that’s a lot of fun to go back with the wonderful bright orange and harvest gold colors of the 1970s. But she really returned to it as the retirement project and me obviously being the younger generation, I was always bringing down the average age of the quilt groups when we would attend events together. But yeah, it’s been a wonderful hobby to share as adults.

Carolina Moore:
That’s so fun. My mom started quilting as well, so we both have quilting in common and it’s fun to share fabric or work on patterns and there’s one template that I’ll never use again, and she said, “I want to try that quilt.” And I said, “You can have mine.” I’ll never do another pineapple block in my life.

Andi Stanfield:
Oh my goodness.

Carolina Moore:
“You may have it.” Yeah, that’s fun. So at what point did you go from sewing, making quilts for yourself to working on your own business? Did it start with a book or was there something before that?

Andi Stanfield:
There were a few steps earlier than that I would say because I definitely am a teacher at heart. I mentioned I taught high school for many years, and so it was fairly natural for me to want to teach quilting as well once I had gained experience and learned what I was doing and was in a position to have some knowledge to share with others. And so I ran a strip club when jelly rolls first hit the market, and that was one of the classes that she had at the shop that she let me take over. And so I ran that program and I just choose a different jelly roll based pattern and curate the fabric for it. And so having that consistent program as an endeavor that I was in charge of sent me on the path.
And then she came up with the idea for a book a few years later and we worked on that as self-publishers that, even working with a traditional publisher, to put a book out is obviously that many more times more work than just putting out a single pattern. So it was definitely a long process. But yeah, there were some other classes and themed events I guess, that I worked on first as I took steps to gain my confidence in being a quilt entrepreneur.

Carolina Moore:
Yes. So you self-published the book?

Andi Stanfield:
Yes, I remember pitching our second book. So we just wanted to get the first one, the monochromatic book out in the world. So we looked at the Amazon publishing options, which has since been called Kindle Direct Publishing, KDP, and that is actually a fairly simple process to create the document. Obviously everything else that goes into writing patterns and putting graphics with them and all that sort of thing, getting the layout exactly right, but once the document is ready, putting it onto the platform and offering it for sale is very clear cut, fairly simple process through KDP. So that’s been fun to have that out there.
And then when we talked about a second book on a totally different topic, which was angle plate templates, which make half rectangle triangles, we did pitch that to a traditional publisher and they were not interested and we said, well, rather than shop around to the other half a dozen publishing companies out there, let’s just do the self-publishing thing again. So yes, I have two titles out that have been self-published.

Carolina Moore:
I think that’s fabulous and I love that self-publishing means that we can have more of these books out in the market because a traditional publisher, they only have room in their catalog to publish so many books per year and they have to make decisions, and there’s various reasons that certain books get published and others don’t, and it isn’t necessarily because the ones that the publishers aren’t publishing aren’t great books that need to exist. So I love that the great books that need to exist have a path to exist regardless of aligning with a traditional publisher’s catalog for that season.

Andi Stanfield:
And for quilters especially that may not sell thousands of books, the self-publishing print on demand option is really attractive because you can do those smaller print runs and still be known for that one thing and have that book available without having to rent a storage facility for extra pallets of books that are going to weigh you down for years thinking, how am I going to market these and get my information out there?

Carolina Moore:
Well then making that financial risk, especially with either your business’s money or your family’s money of I’m going to spend this many thousands or even tens of thousands of dollars to do a run of books that might take me years to actually sell and make my money back.

Andi Stanfield:
Yeah, I think it’s a great option, but I’m always open to all the different routes. So if I was able to work with a larger company and do a more traditionally published book and have a team of people, that’s certainly attractive because as we know, the solopreneur job juggling all the hats of marketing and distribution and everything else can get a little overwhelming at times. So there is the pluses and minuses to every option.

Carolina Moore:
Yes. Trying to do all the things. And so you were doing all the things and then said, “I should also design a ruler.” I should add that, right. Is this the thought that you had? How did the ruler come about?

Andi Stanfield:
Well, no, because I looked at all the tools that are already available and said that is a path that I probably will not go down. But I mentioned that we had worked on a book about half rectangle triangles, so I am intrigued by that shape, that unit in quilts.
And in 2023, I am working on a Block of the Month program called Little Bit Different. And the thing that sets it apart is that I am working with six by nine inch blocks instead of a traditional square block. So as I make all my blocks rectangular, that means I’m working with more half rectangle triangles to incorporate or reinterpret traditional blocks into this new size.
And I got a few months in and said, you know what? I’m really tired of searching for those six by nine inch lines on my 12 by 12 ruler, and you know what? I know a guy who makes rulers, so let me see what he can do for me. And so that began the discussion of the ruler, but it really did just naturally evolve as I need a thing to do this one step. And I luckily had the contacts to put that all together. So it was a situation of necessity as the mother of invention. So there we go.

Carolina Moore:
So you knew a guy who made rulers. How do you get these kinds of people in your sphere is I’m sure what everyone wants to know.

Andi Stanfield:
Right? Well, it’s the contacts you make in the quilting industry because this circles back around to the angle plate templates because when my mom and I wrote our angle plate book on half rectangle triangles, the quilter who initially designed that template is Margaret Miller. Well, she was ready to retire, so she sold her templates and the rights to that to Julie and Rick Loma, and we worked with Julie and Rick on our angle plate book and obviously have kept up that relationship over the years. They have since expanded from just the angle plate templates into other rulers and manufacturing of templates. And so when I had the idea for a new size ruler, that was my first thought of Rick is the guy I need to talk to make rulers and templates because that’s part of his business. And we had been in contact pretty regularly over the last few years.
So yeah, we spent a few weeks going back and forth with design options and ideas because since he’s manufacturing the rulers, he could get all the special markings that I wanted so that it has very clear lines for your seam allowance. It has the diagonal markings for the half rectangle triangles. It’s got very specific sizes for obviously the ruler trims, the six and a half by nine and a half block that I’m working with in my Block of the Month. But there are also clear markings for the two-inch by three inch units that I use to make the bigger block each month. So it’s been really exciting to see that develop and have it manufactured and show up on my door.

Carolina Moore:
So folks who have been listening to the podcast in order or this season one in order know Julie Loma already, that name sounds familiar because we had her on the podcast talking about their business. So it’s really fun to talk to someone on the other side of that relationship who connected with them and said, “Hey, can you help me make this?” So can you talk a little bit, how easy was that process? What did you need to know? What do you wish you knew before jumping into that process?

Andi Stanfield:
It’s similar to the self-publishing. You read the guidelines of what you need to submit. So that’s the way I approached the ruler. I talked to Julie and Rick and said, okay, I am thinking this size. And then he was able to ask about the markings that were going to be so integral to making it a useful item specifically for my program, and then just evolved as a natural conversation.
Obviously, you want to go in, if you’re having a physical object produced, you need to have some idea in your mind of what it looks like, the sizes and those things. And then luckily Rick has the resources and was able to say the biggest stumbling block that we found was thinking about how the numbers would go on a ruler and as a right-handed quilter, it was one of these things where I had to put the rulers that I already had down on fabric and sketch out how I work because the image he sent back looked backwards to me, and we had this back and forth on email for a while of, wait a minute, I’m doing things in these specific steps with the ruler in this orientation and how can we make it useful?
And since it is a six and a half inch ruler, obviously that’s not symmetric. You have full inches from one direction and that extra half inch on the other side. So we did figure out finally, it’s one of those silly things that are like, oh, you just have to rotate 180 and then the numbers will be right side up for a left-handed person instead of trying to flip it over and that thing. So we got there eventually.

Carolina Moore:
I love that you were thinking about both right-handed people, which make up a majority of the population, but not all, and then left-handed people who tend to get left out in that minority.

Andi Stanfield:
And I think that comes from teaching because they’re always are those people in the minority that you need to be aware of what the struggles might be for beginners or people using your tools and patterns and don’t just assume that the way the majority does it is working for everyone. So yeah, I was happy that I did have that thought and took the time to figure out how it would be useful.
And the other great thing about working with Julie and Rick Loma is that their production process uses an easy grip surface on their rulers and templates. So this is a non-slip ruler. You don’t have to add any other pieces or stickers or whatever to the ruler. It stays in place very easily, and I know a lot of quilters appreciate having that non-slip surface because you don’t want to get to the edge of your cut and then slip on the ruler and there you’ve made an error and have to start over

Carolina Moore:
And then you cut into that precious fabric in a way that you did not intend to.

Andi Stanfield:
And then you have to go back to the store and then you see something new and wonderful and then a hundred dollars later.

Carolina Moore:
Well, I mean going back to the store and picking out more fabric. I mean, I’ll cut into my fabric wrong all day long to get to go back to the store and pick out new things. This does not sound like a downside.
So you had the template designed with your purpose in mind and how it needed to work for your students. You thought about, and then there was the time to make the decision of, okay, yes, I’m going to order these, we’re going to have these made. What were you feeling at that point?

Andi Stanfield:
I was very appreciative of a company like Off the Wall Quilt, Julie and Rick, that can do small runs again, I said that was a benefit of the self-publishing and I did not have to outlay thousands of dollars. I was able to get a small production run of these rulers and test out the concept. Yes, there are a lot of nerves going when you have something brand new and are thinking, are people going to like this? Is this going to be useful? And my audience, my quilt group loves it. Everybody at my in-person sew day when I debuted it, everybody wanted to take one home. So that was great. I was able to reach out on my Block of the Month audience. Obviously that group has been interested in it. They’ve been sewing along for six, seven months now at the time of recording, so they find it useful. I do have a substantial audience on my YouTube channel and was able to demonstrate through YouTube videos and it’s gotten a good reception. I’m happy with it.

Carolina Moore:
That’s phenomenal. I love that. So do you have more plans of things that you want to do with this ruler or more rulers that you want to do in the future, or are you going to go a different direction?

Andi Stanfield:
I found it so serendipitous that just this idea came to me in conjunction with the Block of the Month program that I was doing. I don’t want it to just be a single item, single pattern tool. I find that very frustrating and I’d like to be able to expand on an option. And that was the reason we wanted to, my mom and I wanted to put out the angle playbook several years ago is because there weren’t a lot of patterns out there, and when you buy a set of templates to make one quilt and then they gathers dust, that seems very, very frustrating.
So I do have plans to continue the little bit different series of blocks, so hopefully there will be after the 2023 Block of the Month ends there, that will continue into future years and we can continue using that little bit different ruler because six by nine inch blocks are fun to take the traditional square quilt block and reinterpret it.

Carolina Moore:
Yes, absolutely. I love that. Not everything has to be squares and half square triangles. You can play with rectangles as well. There’s so many options and ways that you can go quilting.

Andi Stanfield:
The one thing that you have to remember that makes half rectangle triangles a little harder to deal with than half square triangles is they are not perfectly symmetric. You have to have a right-hand and left-hand version, a right facing or a left facing unit, their mirror images and not just, you can’t just rotate it 90 degrees and have it line up. So that has been a design challenge. That is fun for me because when I taught high school, I actually taught algebra and geometry, which ties into quilting so beautifully that those design challenges and quilt math are something I actually enjoy.

Carolina Moore:
I loved algebra and geometry as well in school, but I know not every quilter loved those kinds of subjects, and I love that quilt pattern designers can put together these patterns so that people who don’t love the quilt math don’t have to do the quilt math.

Andi Stanfield:
Right. Just reach out to your nearest designer and there’s a lot of us out there and we’ll be happy to help.

Carolina Moore:
Well, and likely we already have a whole stack of patterns for you to pick from that are already ready and set to go.

Andi Stanfield:
Exactly. There you go.

Carolina Moore:
So you mentioned teaching as well. You’re still teaching at the shop, or can people bring you to their guilds or bring you to their local shops to be able to teach as well?

Andi Stanfield:
Yes, to both of those options. I do have some classes regularly occurring at my local shop. There’s a bunch here in Phoenix, so I don’t recommend visiting during our 2023 record-breaking heat wave, but we are a lovely destination in January and February when you’re tired of the weather in other parts of the world. Those are our prime tourist days. But yes, and I’m happy to do Zoom lectures for guilds and travel if we can work that out. I do still have a full-time job. I’ve left the public education world, but I develop training now for other organizations. So my schedule is not completely open for quilting, but I do try to work it in as much as possible.

Carolina Moore:
I love that when you have a quilting business, it can work around whatever other obligations you have, whether it be another job or family or other family. [inaudible 00:27:38].

Andi Stanfield:
Yeah, my family has learned that if we can plan vacations around quilt destinations and find a little something for everyone to be interested in, then mom’s a happy camper.

Carolina Moore:
Oh, that’s fun. What quilting destinations do you like to go for or have you already seen then?

Andi Stanfield:
Let’s see. I did take my sewing machine to my daughter’s summer camp one year. I would drop her off as a day camper and I would sew in the hotel room, so that was fun. We haven’t made any wild trips. We did take a trip to Hawaii and luckily there was a quilt show on the islands we were there, so I was able to do that. It wasn’t a full on destination, but the quilt show was a bonus. Hawaii was a big draw, but.

Carolina Moore:
You haven’t convinced the family to do a family destination in the very, very exotic Hamilton, Missouri, or Paducah, Kentucky.

Andi Stanfield:
Right. Those may have to be girlfriend trips, but I would love to get back over to England, and if I could line that up with one of their festival of quilts, that would be a lot of fun. Or one of the quilting cruises is a very attractive option as well, because then I can go do my quilting thing and there’s plenty of entertainment options on the cruise ships, so I think everybody would be happy with that.

Carolina Moore:
Yes, the quilting cruises have gotten very popular. I did my first one this past January, and I’m doing one later this month in August, and the August cruise, my husband is coming along, so I’ll be teaching during the day on all the sailing days, and we’ll see if he’s entertained enough bopping around the ship on his own. But that’s definitely a fun option for sure.

Andi Stanfield:
Yeah, I’d love to get these family perspectives of what’s going on. I was talking to another friend who said that she made QuiltCon last year, a family event because it happened to be in a location where she had lived when her children were young, and so they were able to return and say, “Hey, this is where you grew up,” and the whole family came and saw the show. So that sounded fun as well to get an outside perspective. Sometimes being in the industry, it’s refreshing to have those other opinions as well as the quilt civilians come and see your work.

Carolina Moore:
Oh, I love being a quilt tourist, and I mean, I started in this industry as a hobbyist as well, so that’s still very much part of my roots, and I love being a hobbyist whenever possible. It’s fun. Although I’ve had people, I was in a class at, I guess two years ago now where one of the other students knew me and she said, “Well, what are you doing taking the class?” And I said, “Well, I mean, I want to learn this technique too.” There’s nothing about being a professional. That means that suddenly I knew all the things, and plus it’s a great teacher. I wanted to learn from this teacher. I wanted to learn the technique she was teaching. Even on this side of quilting, there’s so much more always to learn.

Andi Stanfield:
Yeah, and quilting is such a big industry, big tent of options that yeah, you can’t know everything and it’s fun to dabble in things that are not your primary interest. So yeah, I think that’s a wonderful attitude, a wonderful experience. And I try to take classes regularly too, just so that as you said, you can learn from these great names in our field and you can just have a fun creative day learning something new. That’s always a time well spent.

Carolina Moore:
Absolutely. So you have some new videos that you’re working on. You’re finishing up this Block of the Month. Have you planned out any patterns that you’re doing for next year already? I mean, it’s still early in this year. We’ve got to finish out this year.

Andi Stanfield:
Things are just percolating right here in late summer. And then we’ll see. As I said, I really have been energized by this six by nine block size, and I think there’s a lot of things to explore. So I have been developing individual patterns that go along with each monthly block so that quilters will be eventually able to use them as sampler patterns, obviously with the 12 blocks. But then there are also other options if you wanted to take one block and put that as the featured blocks.
So I have lots of pattern ideas that I haven’t had time to publish yet, so eventually I can work through the backlog there. I’ve heard one of the memes that tends to go around is I have so many unfinished objects that I have to finish before I die. I am going to live to 867, and that’s how I feel with patterns that I want to get out in the world because I’ll sketch them out and I’ll write a few bits of the initial construction and then I get busy with the next thing and never get back around to it. So yeah, there’s always something that I could be launching fresh, I suppose is the way to say it, but we’ll focus on the little bit different six by nine blocks for a little while longer. Well,

Carolina Moore:
I think these really are a fresh take because I mean, you’ve got a churn dash block that is six by nine, and I think a little bit different is the perfect words to describe it because I can tell it’s a churn dash block, but you’ve got this new twist and new take on it.

Andi Stanfield:
Yeah. The other favorite one from the spring was the Stretched Star. When I did the Friendship Star in that rectangular format, that was a lot of fun as well.

Carolina Moore:
Oh, I’ll have to find that link and I’ll make sure to add it to the show notes as well so people can go see the churn dash and the Stretch Star to see what these look like in a six by nine format, that rectangular format, rather than the traditional square format that we’re used to seeing.

Andi Stanfield:
Yeah, I love that design prompt. My mom always laughs at me when I say that I am joining a swap or a challenge because she’s like, “You have all these other things to do.” And I’m like, but I just enjoy the design challenge, the prompt aspect of what could you do with X, Y, Z components? And in this case, the six by nine idea. I had seen a sampler quilt years ago with that format. I tried a few blocks and then I sat down. I was trying to say, can I make 12 blocks out of this? And the ideas flowed pretty quickly, so I said, hey, let’s go with this. And then just a few weeks ago I was re-imagining a different project and I said, hey, could I make this work in six by nine? And I could. And then I’ve got another whole set of blocks. So yeah, it’s been really fun to see where you can go when you just have that first seed of an idea.

Carolina Moore:
Absolutely. That’s so fun. Now, is there anything else you want to add before we sign off for the day?

Andi Stanfield:
No, I’m just happy to talk to some new people about my little bit different ruler and Block of the Month program. Thanks so much for having me. And look for me on YouTube primarily and as True Blue Quilts, and people can also find me on my TrueBlueQuilts.com website. Instagram and Facebook are the other places I generally hang out.

Carolina Moore:
We’ll make sure to have all those links in the show notes, and those will be @ilovenotions.com so people can find those show notes and click on all those places, follow you and be inspired by your journey into the rectangle.

Andi Stanfield:
Thanks so much. It’s been a pleasure.

Carolina Moore:
Thanks for being here. Friends, that’s our episode for today. I hope you loved it as much as I loved having this conversation. Remember that you can find all the details that we talked about in the show notes, and those are all@ilovenotions.com. And make sure to leave this podcast a review in your favorite podcasting app. Leaving it a review will help the podcast algorithm show this podcast to other people who love notions just as much as we do.
Friends, that’s all I have for you today, but I will see you right here real soon. Bye for now.

The post Andi Stanfield – True Blue Quilts appeared first on i love notions.

Within a few months, SewTites were available through distributors and in local quilt shops, and today are availabe in the US, Canada, Australia, Europe, and worldwide through SewTites.com

Their mission is to empower themselves and others to “Live Magnetically” – as fully and intentionally as possible. As a part of that mission, they donate 5% of annual profits to FCCLA, an organization that teaches teens life skills, including sewing, on their path to adulthood.

Show Notes:

Click here to purchase Sew Tites through the Affiliate link.
Learn all about the Sew Tites Magnetic Cutting System here, and use code CAROLINAMOORE for 15% off
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Transcript of the Episode:

Carolina Moore:
I love notions, and I’m guessing that you do too. Hey there, friend. It’s Carolina Moore, your favorite sewing and quilting YouTuber, and now podcaster, here with another episode.
I’m here with Jessica, one of the magic brains behind SewTites. You probably don’t know this, but I’ve been your fan since I discovered your product. I just think it is so genius, so clever. We need more magnets in our lives. Throughout the process, you have continued to create more and more magnets. You’ve built this entire brand around all these amazing magnets that make our lives easier. Before we get into all the new stuff that you have going, let’s start at the very beginning. Where did you get this idea?

Jessica:
My sister, Jamie, she’s really the quilting and sewing half of our business. I’m the marketing and design-

Carolina Moore:
Nice.

Jessica:
That aspect. We were in business previously. It was actually our parents in 2017, they’re entrepreneurial, but they’re retired, but they had some friends making money online, and I knew how to do that, websites and marketing. So my parents came and were like, “We want to start a business. You know how to do it. Come up with an idea of something online, and we’re going to do it.” I was like, “Okay.” Then my sister and my mom both quilt and sew, I was like, “Well, how about we involve Jamie too, and we do that?” So we ended up doing a fabric subscription box first. We were a modern fabric subscription box, only for a year and a half. But our first-

Carolina Moore:
What I know the name of it? [inaudible 00:01:55]

Jessica:
It was called Culcita. It was orange boxes. I’m not sure. We didn’t have that many subscribers.

Carolina Moore:
But, not everyone… You don’t always hit a home run your first time at bat, and that’s okay.

Jessica:
Yeah. At first, we did not just fabric, but we also did bag making kits. Jamie was making a blog tutorial for the buyers of the box, to help with making the bag. Actually, I think it was our first month. She was sewing a leather handle on the bag, and it was away from an edge, so she couldn’t use a clip, and then she didn’t want to put a permanent pinhole through the leather so she couldn’t use a pin. She happened to have some magnets, and thought of it, and put some on there. Then she also happened to tell me about the idea. She was like, “Look at my really good idea.” I said, “That has to be a problem other people have.”

Carolina Moore:
Absolutely.

Jessica:
You should think about doing something with that, sell that product. But, we were focused on that business. We were trying to make that business really run.

Carolina Moore:
The box business?

Jessica:
Yeah. About a year later, we were going to QuiltCon in Pasadena in 2018, and we were trying to think of something to get people to come, like a freebie handout, a promotional item.

Carolina Moore:
Sure.

Jessica:
In January, it’s a February show, I said, “Maybe we should see if people think that this idea, magnets for sewing, is a good idea. Just take some prototypes and hand them out for free, and see.” So we got some prototypes made, they were just black at the time, named them, which is still the same name. We brainstormed really quickly. In a couple of days, named it, and then put a singular magnet on a business card, assembled them while we were driving down to Pasadena with our friend Susie, who was working for us at the time, and then handed them out, just showing bag making. We actually still have some of the same demos now that we still used then.

Carolina Moore:
That’s awesome.

Jessica:
People started bringing their friends back and were like, “Oh my gosh, I use soup cans to hold things together right now,” or whatever, using some random way. So we were like, “This is a good idea.” So we went home, I threw up a website. We had our first run made, but I didn’t really initially think about retailing them, I just thought about selling them online.

Carolina Moore:
Sure.

Jessica:
So, I didn’t make them retail ready. We sent them out in our box, and we sent them to the industry friends we had made so far. One of those was Kitty Wilkin Night Quilter. She was like, “I think this would work for EPP.” So, she was the catalyst for that. Then we could see that we needed some smaller ones for the smaller hexes, and whatnot. But about six months after we launched, which was very quiet because we didn’t trust fully that people would really buy them, especially compared to straight pins, they were really expensive. So, we just didn’t think that people would necessarily find the value in them to pay that much money. But, they are durable. You use them over, and over, and over again.

Carolina Moore:
You don’t lose them like a pin.

Jessica:
Right.

Carolina Moore:
Nobody in your sewing room steps on them, like they do a pin.

Jessica:
Right. Yeah. Yeah, exactly. But then in August of that same year, six months later, I got a call from E.E. Schenck, asking me if I wanted to distribute through them. Then I got a Checker call.

Carolina Moore:
E.E. Schenck and Checker are big distributors in this industry. So when you get a call from them, that means something, they want to sell it because they’ll buy it and go sell it to quilt shops.

Jessica:
Right.

Carolina Moore:
Now you’ll have your stuff in quilts shops.

Jessica:
Yeah. I was like, “Oh, this must be actually a really good idea because a distributor-

Carolina Moore:
‘Cause they sought you out.

Jessica:
Is calling me. I’m not even having to pitch them. They literally found us online, or heard about us from somebody. I, again, didn’t even have the packaging retail-ready, but that’s what I’ve done my entire career. So I bought the UPC codes, made the packaging much prettier for retail, and they’re not much different, even now. They’ve evolved a little bit since then. Then we were being carried by all major distributors in the US, by that market. Then we just kept having customers suggest ideas, or uses, or industry friends. That’s how we kept adding to the line. But Annie with ByAnnie, she was like, “The originals aren’t strong enough when you’re using our Soft and Stable,” so we did our HDs, and we’re actually hopefully going to be coming out with a yet even stronger version when you are using really a lot of layers of [inaudible 00:06:17].

Carolina Moore:
Oh, wow.

Jessica:
Then Magnum, Sarah Thomas of SARIDITTY has been a good supporter of ours. Those loading on long arms, and-

Carolina Moore:
The longarm ones are genius. So those are big, giant-

Jessica:
Right, they’re longer.

Carolina Moore:
SewTites that can get put on longarms for-

Jessica:
Yeah, but they’re still easy to handle. They’re not so big that they’re unwieldy. They are very strong, so they don’t pinch your finger. There’s lots of benefits to the size. We do get requests still for even longer, but they would pinch, generally.

Carolina Moore:
So you’ve done the testing to make sure that what we’re getting and on our end is something that we’re actually going to want to use, rather than what we think we want to use.

Jessica:
Right, yeah.

Carolina Moore:
Please tell me about your new product. So you came out with this new product. When someone said, SewTites has a cutting mat, I thought, “Well, I already have a cutting mat. My cutting mat is fine. There’s nothing wrong with my cutting mat. I see no problems with my cutting mat.” Honestly, I’ve got to tell you, I was really “nah” on it.

Jessica:
Right.

Carolina Moore:
Then I saw a video of you demoing this cutting mat, and I was sold immediately. So yes, please talk about this new cutting mat.

Jessica:
So, it’s a full system. It’s a mat, ruler, and extra magnets. We’re calling it the Sew Magnetic Cutting System. The mat is a seven layer, double-sided, self-healing mat that’s magnetic. It has a metal interior. One side is light gray with black lines, one side is dark gray with white lines, depending on the kind of material you’re using and how you want to see it. Or else, there’s plenty of people who are content creators and things that want the match to coordinate-

Carolina Moore:
The match of color.

Jessica:
Or look better in a photo or video. So that’s why we did that. It is 20×24, so you can put a full fat quarter on the mat and still see all.

Carolina Moore:
I think that’s so genius, at a full fat quarter, because we’ll get these smaller mats because they fit our space. But the designer of the mat was just thinking about, whatever their requirements were for cutting something off.

Jessica:
Whatever everybody’s done before, I think it what’s-

Carolina Moore:
And, didn’t consider a fat quarter.

Jessica:
Right.

Carolina Moore:
When was the first fat quarter invented? They haven’t been around as long-

Jessica:
No idea.

Carolina Moore:
As quilting has. I’m sure cutting mats have been around longer than fat quarters have.

Jessica:
Maybe even cutting mats were just more paper products and stuff initially, and then it came over and they just did the same size. I have no idea.

Carolina Moore:
So you reinvented the cutting mat for actual quilters-

Jessica:
Right, yeah.

Carolina Moore:
Just based on size, and we haven’t even gotten to the cool magic magnetic stuff that it does.

Jessica:
Right, yeah. It does have whole inch mark numberings on it, and it also has half inch numberings on one axis. So you rotate the mat depending on how you’re cutting, what kind of cuts you’re making. Then the ruler has embedded magnets in it. So it’s a typical quilters acrylic ruler. It’s actually a little thicker than a typical ruler, because we have the magnets in it. It’s 6 1/2 x 24. So there is, again, one axis that has full inch numbering, and then half inch on the other side. They’re different colors. It’s turquoise and black imprint.

Carolina Moore:
Those colors are so cute too.

Jessica:
Oh, thanks.

Carolina Moore:
Anytime, turquoise everything.

Jessica:
Turquoise everything.

Carolina Moore:
Yes.

Jessica:
You just rotate it. We are doing both a true left-handed system as well as right-handed. There are two different skews. The ruler is, like so many other people are doing, where their numbering’s mirrored for lefties. Our mat is also for the left-handed skews. So the numbering is mirrored for those people who cut that.

Carolina Moore:
So a left-handed quilter can get a different mat and a different ruler that will be perfect for them as a left-handed quilter.

Jessica:
Correct.

Carolina Moore:
And, they don’t have to wait. It’s not like when a new app comes out for iPhone, all the Android users have to wait six months for theirs. When a new tool comes out for quilters, all the lefties have to wait six months, but you’re not making the lefties wait six months.

Jessica:
No. Nope.

Carolina Moore:
They get theirs when all us righties get ours.

Jessica:
Yeah. I hope they buy it because we estimated our production.

Carolina Moore:
All right, lefties, this is your chance to show up and say, “Yes, we appreciate products that are made for us and have us in mind.” Is there a lefty in your family that made you think of that?

Jessica:
No. Jamie, my sister, she owns a quilt shop now, also. She bought a quilt shop in April, 2021 in Calgary, and she has a person who’s left-handed that works for her, we just thought… I think I was maybe looking at something and I saw a left-handed one, and I was like, “We should probably think about doing left-handed.” It’s not really more. It’s more, but it’s not more, to produce that kind of a product for left and right.

Carolina Moore:
But it’s one more thing that you have in storage-

Jessica:
It’s one more thing to keep track of.

Carolina Moore:
For you, as a company.

Jessica:
Yes, but that’s fine. We have the both skews, and then it comes with 12 extra cylindrical magnets that we’re calling boosters. They’re turquoise also, with our logo debossed on them, and they make the ruler even stronger. It’s a non-slip system, I guess I haven’t really said that yet. So the ruler has magnets in it, and it makes it so you don’t have to put as much pressure on it when you’re cutting.

Carolina Moore:
So if I’m understanding this, the mat has a metal core basically inside it.

Jessica:
Correct, yeah.

Carolina Moore:
Then I take your ruler that has magnets embedded in the ruler, and those magnets don’t interfere with me being able to see my lines or do any cutting.

Jessica:
Right.

Carolina Moore:
But those magnets will pinch my fabric between the ruler and the mat so that it stays put, and so all of us who have carpal tunnel, arthritis, any problems with our wrist, I have really bad tendonitis in my wrist, we don’t get that hand fatigue from cutting because we don’t need to hold down the fabric so much.

Jessica:
Right.

Carolina Moore:
The ruler and the mat together are going to hold that in place.

Jessica:
Correct, and it will hold several layers of quilting cotton on its own, just the ruler with the embedded magnets. You do still have to put a little pressure on it. It’s not like you can’t touch it at all, but it is strong enough too, that it will hold it things in place with a little bit of additional pressure, but a lot less than you’re used to. Then you can still shift it when you need to align it, make your measurement and everything.

Carolina Moore:
So it’s not like my really heavy duty fridge magnets that, if I have a paper on my fridge and I put the magnet on top, I need to really pull the magnet off and then move the paper and then the magnet snaps back on.

Jessica:
Right. Right. Then the short ends of the ruler also have a beveled edge, so you can use that to lift the ruler also, so you don’t have to do the hand claw to get it off of the mat.

Carolina Moore:
Oh, nice.

Jessica:
So it has a little bit of that to help you take it off as well. But it also shifts just horizontally while it’s on the mat, very easily.

Carolina Moore:
So the beveled edge means that your finger slips underneath the ruler more easily to pick it up, rather than those flush ends which are squared off.

Jessica:
Right.

Carolina Moore:
Oh, perfect.

Jessica:
Which, even a typical ruler is harder to pick up because it doesn’t have that. You have to slide it off the mat, generally. This one, you can just lift it.

Carolina Moore:
So that’s, again, for people who have pinching and finger grip. I love accessibility in quilting, especially since the average quilter is in her 60s. One of these days, I’m going to be a quilter in my 60s-

Jessica:
Right.

Carolina Moore:
And, I want all these tools to make my life easier as well.

Jessica:
It’s been one of the magical things about our products. We didn’t know when we were starting it, but we have so many people tell us how grateful they are for them because they didn’t think they could hand sew anymore, and now they’re using SewTites, and it’s enabled them to for EPP or applique.

Carolina Moore:
Because a lot of the pinch that you need when English paper piecing, or when appliqueing, all that finger strength that you need, and then the hand fatigue that you have the next day.

Jessica:
Absolutely. We’ve already had comments on our social media, since we’ve started promoting this product, “This is going to be great for adoptive sewing.” Then the little cylindrical root magnets that I was telling you about, snap onto the ruler to make it even stronger when you get those really thick projects, like the Soft and Stable pre-quilted projects, wools, leathers.

Carolina Moore:
I love this because this is where science and quilting come together. We talk about quilt math all the time, and pattern designers make patterns so that people don’t have to do their own quilt math, the math is already done for you.

Jessica:
Right.

Carolina Moore:
You’ve done the science, because magnets and the strength of magnets, the more magnets you stack up on top of one another, the stronger that magnetic pull becomes.

Jessica:
Right.

Carolina Moore:
You knew that because you’re smart people. Most of us, when we deal with magnets, we’re dealing with refrigerator magnets, and they’re usually decorative, so we don’t stack them on top of one another.

Jessica:
Right.

Carolina Moore:
But physics teaches us that the more magnets you stack on top, the stronger they are, the stronger the whole unit will become. They work like a team.

Jessica:
Right.

Carolina Moore:
So now, if I’m doing a bag and I have fusible fleece or Soft and Stable on that metal match, and then I put the ruler on top, the ruler itself won’t have the pull to pinch the fabric between. So you put these little cylindrical units right on top of the existing magnets, and they just team up and buddy up to make them stronger.

Jessica:
Correct, and it’s great. So it really does make those even thicker, harder to cut things just that much easier to cut. Then you can also use those boosters we’re calling for pulling down acrylic templates as well as garment patterns and things that you don’t want to put a pinhole through, or you can’t ’cause it’s acrylic.

Carolina Moore:
So if I have a ruler that isn’t one of your rulers, isn’t a SewTites ruler, I can use those boosters on top of just a regular ruler, and it’ll help pinch the ruler and the fabric underneath?

Jessica:
We haven’t tested with other rulers, but it would probably help with one layer or two layers of quilting cotton. But again, it wouldn’t be strong enough for those thicker times. But, it probably would help with those.

Carolina Moore:
Oh, nice. But also, if I’m doing any paper patterns, like a softie, or a banner, or certain bag patterns that have templates, I can use those boosters on top, or garment making. I can put those boosters on top and they’ll act like pattern weights.

Jessica:
Exactly. You can use our HDs as well, but it does come with 12 of those boosters. So, you can hopefully have enough.

Carolina Moore:
When say HDs, what are the HDs?

Jessica:
HDs is another one of our products, it’s the long blue one.

Carolina Moore:
Oh. Because, of course, I can use any of your existing SewTites magnets that I already have right on top of this mat as well.

Jessica:
Right.

Carolina Moore:
So it’s not a standalone product, it works with all the other stuff that I already have in yours that I love.

Jessica:
Yes.

Carolina Moore:
That’s fabulous.

Jessica:
So it is a patented system. It’s being sold as a set currently. We are going to develop more rulers, sizes of mats.

Carolina Moore:
Well, I would hope so.

Jessica:
Individually, as well, so you can mix and match. But it is just the initial lots currently.

Carolina Moore:
Sure.

Jessica:
Yeah. We’re taking pre-orders now. Retail shops can buy it through us wholesale, or through Checker, or other distributors that we have around the world. Then, it’s shipping in September. We’re just saying, in September at some point.

Carolina Moore:
Okay. So quilter should have this in their shop hopefully by October, November, we would hope?

Jessica:
Yeah. Shops should have them on their shelves. Yes, by October.

Carolina Moore:
You have it as one whole system, so I don’t have to worry about going to the shop and they only have the ruler, they’re out of the mats. If I can go get it, I can get my hands on all the parts at the same time. I don’t have to go find the pieces and piecemeal until it’s really out there. People are able to have what they need, and then they can go get the add-on pieces.

Jessica:
Correct. For quilters that don’t have a dedicated cutting space, the box that it comes in is a reusable box. It has a carry handle, and there’s foam inside of it, so it will help with storage. Of course, you can still throw it away.

Carolina Moore:
Also, take it to your retreats-

Jessica:
You can take it to your retreats, yes.

Carolina Moore:
And have an easy way to show off your brand new, amazing… We know that we quilters love to bring all of our stuff to retreats so we can show off to all our friends, “Look at this cool stuff that you also need to get.”

Jessica:
Right. That’s how we found out about all the great notions.

Carolina Moore:
Right. Well, congratulations.

Jessica:
Thank you.

Carolina Moore:
Thank you for coming up with an amazing notion that we didn’t even know that we needed. But now that we know it exists, we definitely need it.

Jessica:
Yes.

Carolina Moore:
I can’t wait to see all the new stuff that you all come out with because-

Jessica:
Thank you.

Carolina Moore:
You just keep coming out with more and better stuff.

Jessica:
Yeah, we have more magnetic things coming.

Carolina Moore:
Of course you do. Yay.

Jessica:
My sister says it’s like ketchup, we just put magnets on everything.

Carolina Moore:
Friends, that’s our episode for today. I hope you loved it as much as I loved having this conversation. Remember that you can find all the details that we talked about in the show notes, and those are all at ilovenotions.com. Make sure to leave this podcast a review in your favorite podcasting app. Leaving a review will help the podcast algorithm show this podcast to other people who love notions just as much as we do. Friends, that’s all I have for you today, but I will see you right here real soon. Bye, for now.

The post Jessica – Sew Tites appeared first on i love notions.

Her quilting journey began in 1987 when Northcott made the transition from fashion to quilting fabric. She has designed many quilts for Northcott and for numerous quilting magazines since 1995 including The Quilter magazine, Love of Quilting and Easy Quilts and continue to contribute to the Golden Peak Media group of publications including McCall’s Quilting and Quiltmaker. In 2008 she started publishing her comprehensive line of quilt patterns that utilize efficient and time-saving techniques.  She specializes in designing quilts using panels and border stripes.

Her first fabric collection released in 2019, and she is the inventor of the E-Z miter tool!

Show Notes:

Get details on Patti’s World of Quilts Travel, Deb Roberts cruise in February here
Check here for updates on the 2024 Alaskan Cruise with Watergirl Quilts
Find Patti’s website here
Shop for the EZ Miter tool here
Follow Patti on Facebook
Check out Patti’s Instagram
Subscribe to Patti’s Youtube Channel

Listen to the episode with Patti Carey:

Follow these links to popular podcast players:

Listen and subscribe here on Apple Podcasts
Listen and subscribe here on Spotify
Listen and Subscribe here on Google Podcasts

Transcript of the interview with Patti Carey:

Carolina Moore:
I love notions and I’m guessing that you do too. Hey there, friend. It’s Carolina Moore, your favorite sewing and quilting YouTuber, and now podcaster, here with another episode. So today, I’m here with Patti Carey of Patti’s Patchwork. We’ll get into her notion, which helps with binding in a little bit. But first I want to introduce you to Patti and we can learn a little bit about her story. Patti, welcome to the podcast.

Patti:
Thanks for having me, Carolina. This is great.

Carolina Moore:
Yeah, I’m so glad that we could connect. So tell me about your journey into quilting. How did quilting find you or how did you find quilting?

Patti:
Well, I wear many hats. One of those hats is as the marketing director for Northcott Fabrics. I have been with Northcott for over 35 years.

Carolina Moore:
Oh, wow.

Patti:
I know. Pretty awesome. It’s a really awesome company to be associated with. In fact, many of our employees have… Our team, actually, we are a team, have been there almost as long as I have. So it’s quite awesome. So at the time I joined Northcott, we were doing fashion fabrics, designing and printing fashion fabrics for the sewers out in the world who were making garments. And that market changed in the late ’80s, and we converted to quilting fabrics because quilters were using our summer cotton prints for making quilts. So we changed to quilting and I had to learn how to quilt because I was responsible for making the displays when we went to our trade shows. So I just kind of learned how to quilt. And gradually, as any quilter knows, quilting kind of takes over your life.
I used to do lots of other hobbies, but gradually, quilting started creeping into my time to do all those other hobbies, and it became rather consuming for me. So quite a few years ago, when as part of my job at Northcott, getting pattern designers to design with our fabrics, kind of a plan that I devised to help our marketing team, we had some collections that pattern designers weren’t necessarily wanting to work with, and I thought, “We need patterns for these.” So I jumped in and said, “This is a good use of this fabric. Let me design a quilt using this fabric.” And so that’s how my pattern journey started. And so now I work part-time with Northcott on their management team, and the bulk of my time is spent working on my pattern business, which is Patti’s Patchwork.

Carolina Moore:
That’s incredible. And if there’s any pattern designers listening, I’m sure they’re jealous that you started out your pattern design career already with a backing of a major fabric company. That’s incredible.

Patti:
It has definitely helped. But when I look at designing a quilt, I look at it from the opposite end of how most quilters do. Most of my quilt patterns, my quilt designs start with the fabric collection as opposed to wanting to design a quilt. So I’m looking at the fabrics and I’m trying to find what I think is the best use for those fabrics. So I want to use those fabrics to their best advantage. And what type of quilt design can I come up with to do that, to showcase that? So, and over the years, I’ve traveled to speak to many guilds, do workshops. I’ve been on quilting cruises that I’ve taught on. And I was doing one of my favorite workshops, and it’s on doing different types of borders, including mitered borders. I’ve been doing mitered borders on my quilts for years because I find that they’re, especially when I do multiple bordered quilts… So a quilt that might have three or four borders on it, it’s faster and easier to sew all those borders together as single strips because strip piecing is fast and quilters do it all the time.
So sew all those strips together and miter it and put it on the quilt. And most cultures seem to be deathly afraid of miters, but once I show them how to do that, then they’re sold with this as well. So when we do the mitered borders, we measure the quilt, we miter the border before we put it on the quilt using the measurements, just taking the measurements from the quilt, and that way, you get a perfect 45-degree angle because you’re cutting that 45-degree angle before you start. And so once you put those borders on the quilt, then you just sew the miters closed, and bam, you’re done. So I was teaching this workshop at a guild that was about a four-hour drive away from me. And when I was doing the workshop, the quilters really got the concept of the mitered borders, but what they struggled with was where to mark, where to start and stop sewing because you need to start and stop sewing on the seam line.
And they were measuring incorrectly when they were trying to mark, some of them were. And I thought, “How can I make it easier for them?” And so on my long four-hour drive home from that guild, I thought, “I really need something, just thing that will help them with that. And that’s where I came up with my E-Z Miter & Lone Star tool. It’s just this tiny little, like an inch and a half by three inch acrylic piece that has holes that are perfectly positioned to mark where to start and stop sewing the miters, and you just plunk it down in that mitered angle that you’ve already cut. The instructions are in the tool as far as how to measure, and you plunk it down and mark your dots, and then you sew from to dot and it works just like a charm.

Carolina Moore:
You touched on a lot of things that I want to ask you about, and the first is a concept. There are certain things within the quilting industry that just fascinate me, and one is notions. I love notions, hence the entire reason for a podcast. But another thing that fascinates me in the quilting industry is this fear that we create around a idea or a technique.

Patti:
Absolutely.

Carolina Moore:
Curves is a common one. And it’s funny because there’ll be people who say, “Oh, no, no, I don’t sew curves.” And then you’ll ask them, “Well, what quilt did you try sewing curves on?” And they’ll say, “Oh, no, no, I’ve never done it, but Jan told me that curves are hard, and if Jan can’t do it, then I don’t want to do it.” And then you find Jan and you say, “Jan, I’m curious. I heard that you’re afraid of curves, and I’m wondering what quilt you tried sewing curves on.” And Jan will say, “Oh, well, I mean, Margaret told me that curves were scary. So if Margaret can’t do it, then I definitely don’t want to do it. And so I don’t sew curves.”
And so you find Margaret, and Margaret’s like, “Well, I learned from Susie, and Susie doesn’t do curves. And if the person who taught me how to quilt doesn’t do curves, then there’s no way that I…” And so we’ve created this generational fear within generations of quilters of “I can’t do a thing because if she can’t do the thing, then clearly I can’t do the thing as well.” I was guilty of this very early on in my quilting career as well. So I think that calling it out and naming that and knowing, hey, just because this fear exists from previous people doesn’t mean that it’s legitimate for them even, let alone that it should be legitimate for you. So I don’t know. Is that an experience that you’ve had with quilting fears?

Patti:
Yes, I think so. I guess I started off with the sewing background because my mom taught me to sew when I was a kid because I wanted to. I wanted to learn how to sew. I was very craft-oriented. And she was a beautiful sewer, made all our clothes when we were kids, so we were the dorky kids going to school.

Carolina Moore:
Oh, I don’t think you were the dorky… You were probably the kids with the custom clothes that everyone was like, “Oh, we’re all wearing the same clothes that came from the same department store. But you have specialists.”

Patti:
Yes, but we had the homemade jeans and we always wanted the Levi’s jeans, but maybe our friends thought, “Oh, we want those homemade jeans.” So I guess coming from the sewing background where curves are something that you sew when you’re sewing a sleeve, you’re sewing curves, I guess I have that background. But I think quilters, I like to tell them they’re better at things than they think they are. They do way more math. Quilters say, “Oh, I hate math.” But they are actually very good at math because every quilt pattern has math in it. They sew a scant 1/4-inch seam. That is not an easy thing to do, when you come from garment sewing, that’s a five-eights inch seam. There’s lots of wiggle room there, but when you have a 1/4-inch seam on a quilt, there is very little wiggle room or else your blocks don’t fit, your piece order doesn’t fit. So quilters really do have very fine motor skills and can do a lot more than I think they give themselves credit for.

Carolina Moore:
I agree. I think that’s a good way of putting it.

Patti:
Yeah.

Carolina Moore:
A mitered border. Can you describe what a mitered border is in a quilt for people who either have never made a quilt with any borders at all or who have just done traditional straight edge borders but have never tried that mitered corner before?

Patti:
Yeah, a mitered border is, I like to think of borders, now that I do a lot of modern quilts now as well as traditional quilts, but to me, a border on a quilt is like a frame. And so it’s just like that picture frame. When you imagine a picture frame in your mind, it has those angled seams at the four corners. And carpenter will tell you those are 45-degree angles. So the angle is, in quilting math, it’s 90 degrees, it’s a square, and ideally two 45-degree angles, which is a miter for most square quilts. That will make those two pieces of fabric line up beautifully. Now, carpenter will tell you a 46 and a 44 add up to 90, but it’s not as pretty as two 45-degree angles. Especially, I started doing mitered borders a lot because Northcott did a lot of, and still does, a lot of border stripes.
And how better to showcase that beautiful floral border stripe or Christmas border stripe or even just a really nice stripe than to put it in the border of a quilt. But when you do that, you don’t necessarily want to do straight seams, you want to do miters, so you get all those stripes to line up to match. And that’s the beauty of a mitered border. And they’re really not hard to sew if you cut it on a 45-degree angle, which we do. We just lay the strip set down on our cutting mat and we use the 45-degree line on our cutting mat or the 45-degree line on our ruler. And then we’ve got our 45-degree angle. And it’s just a case of when I sew them together, even if I miscut ever so slightly, I’ll match the stripes instead of getting the pieces of fabric to line up. You can kind of fudge factor those things into your quilting. We do it all the time.

Carolina Moore:
Yeah, I like to say that fabric is organic, and so it has a heart and a mind, and you can sometimes speak to that heart and mind and say, “All right, let’s work with me a little bit here. It’s not stone, it’s not immovable stone.”

Patti:
No, fabric is fluid as opposed to, and I see that with Northcott. We design on paper with ink and we print on fabric with dye. So they are different processes. Fabric is fluid, it shifts and moves as it’s printed. It shifts and moves as we sew it, so let’s get it to shift and move to our advantage.

Carolina Moore:
Absolutely. So you were saying that you were in your car as you came up with this idea, so you were leaving a talk with a guild or a class with a guild, and you were trying to figure out in your mind a way to come up with a solution for this. At that time, was it just a mitered border tool or did you already know, “Oh, hey, this will also work for Lone Stars”?

Patti:
It is funny that you asked that because the first thing that I did think was, “Oh, yes, it’s for mitered borders.” And then I talked about the concept with a friend. I don’t even know if I had designed it and had some produced at that point, maybe I had. And she said, “Oh, it would be perfect for Lone Stars too.” And I went, “Oh, my gosh.” There was just a light bulb moment for me because I love doing Lone Stars. I love teaching Lone Stars. I do so many quilts that have stars that are the Lone Stars type of quilt. And I thought, “Oh, that’s perfect. Absolutely perfect.” And it does work beautifully for that. I started marketing it then as the E-Z Miter & Lone Star tool so that quilters can use it for both, because quilters that maybe are afraid of doing mitered borders, but think Lone Stars are easy. You can use it for that, and it makes it so much easier to line up the points on your diamonds for the Lone Star with the setting squares and triangles that you are sewing the diamonds to.

Carolina Moore:
So I’ve done, well, this is essentially a Y seam, and for someone who’s heard, “Oh, Y seams are scary,” I’m sure Patti will tell us all, they’re really not, especially with this tool, but a Y seam is a seam that looks like the letter Y. Instead of being a traditional like a T seam where there’s four pieces coming together in the form of an X or a cross, it’s where three seams are coming together. So the shape of a Y has three seams coming together. It’s also sometimes called an inset seam.

Patti:
Yes, that’s a great way to describe it. The shape of a Y. And quilters are used to doing edge to edge sewing. So we strip piece, which is just the most efficient way to get things done. You cannot sew from edge to edge or strip piece when we are doing those Y seams, those mitered borders or Lone Star seams. We do need to sew to the seam line to where the next seam is going to start, and we have to backstitch, secure our stitches in some way and then take it out of the machine. But it allows us to be able to press the fabric, the seams, in a direction that will work for us, and to get the other pieces to fit in there as well.

Carolina Moore:
Yes. So it sounds like the hole in your tool is where you mark that stopping point, because I’ve been trying Y seams and inset seams. Sometimes I’ll get them perfect, and sometimes if I stitch just too far, I end up getting a little pleat or pucker in that point where everything’s coming together.

Patti:
Yes. And I’ve done so many mitered borders. I’ve probably done… I haven’t even kept count of how many quilts I’ve done, but I’ve probably done 800 quilts in the time I’ve been working with Northcott and doing my own patterns. So that’s a lot of quilts.

Carolina Moore:
Yes.

Patti:
And a lot of those quilts, like I say, if I’ve put multiple borders on them, I’m going to strip piece all those border strips together, miter it and put it on. So most, I would say over half of my quilts, have mitered borders, I could do those in my sleep. I just know now. When I do my workshop, I get people to mark, I show them how to mark, even if they’re not using the tool, if they’re just using a ruler, I show them how to mark where this 1/4-inch seam is going to cross that 1/4-inch seam, and right where those lines intersect, that’s where you have to start and stop sewing or just plunk the roll it down.
I don’t need to mark anymore. I know where that is. But I have found, and this really surprised me once I had my tool manufactured, and I thought, “Okay,” even though I can know where to sew, I thought, “I just started using it because it made it faster, it made it foolproof, it took all the guesswork out.” So I am using my tool to do my Lone Stars and my mitered borders, which really surprised me because like I say, I could do this in my sleep, but it’s faster and easier.

Carolina Moore:
I love that.

Patti:
Yeah, it’s really kind of cool when you show people that the whole concept of the mitered borders. And when I walk them through it in the border class that I do, they leave the class going, “Oh, yeah, okay, now I can do mitered borders. Yep.” No hesitation.

Carolina Moore:
They could do mitered borders before they walked in the class, but now they have the confidence to be able to know that it’s successful. And I think that for quilters, when we’re walking into a project, it’s that confidence of, is this going to look good and knowing that? And then also, I learned this later on in quilting when I worked at a quilt shop and people would bring in projects. There’s quilters’ technique envy where you show off a quilt and people say, “Oh, my gosh, you did mitered borders?” And then you get to say, “Yes. Yes, I did. And I could show you how you could do it too.” And that’s really fun that you’re at this level of, yes, I’ve done this really fancy technique, but it doesn’t have to be a secret. We can all do this.

Patti:
Yeah, exactly. That’s what I love about the quilting world. There are so many different ways to do things, and somebody might try the mitered border and say, “Oh, no, it doesn’t work for me.” But I say, “Okay, well give it a try. Give it a try this way.” There’s more than one way to skin a cat. There are so many different ways to do so many different things. And I encourage quilters to try every way.
I learn things sometimes when I’m teaching a workshop, somebody will show me something, a different way of doing something, and I go, “Okay, I like that better.” Maybe I’ll use that technique now instead of the technique I was using before, because I can see that it will make my life easier. And that’s really what I am trying to do with my patterns and with my workshops, is I want the quilters to enjoy what they’re doing. I mean, if you’re not enjoying what you’re doing, find another hobby. But quilting is our passion. We love doing it, and let’s make it as enjoyable as possible. That’s why I’m always on Northcott. Oh, the fabrics feel, we say cottons that feel like silk. Fondling those fabrics, running your hands over, quilters are so tactile. We love the feel of fabric. We want to touch. We want to just hold it in our hands and work with it because it gives us pleasure.

Carolina Moore:
Now, I want to take you back to that moment that you were in the car and you’ve got this four-hour drive and you’re puzzling through, “Okay, what is the solution to help my students find this success?” And your brain comes up with this idea of the E-Z Miter tool that eventually becomes the E-Z Miter & Lone Star tool. And I think many of us have been in that situation either in the shower or long car drives. Something about those is very hypnotic where we come up with these ideas, but there’s that huge jump of turning an idea into a reality. And what did that jump look like for you?

Patti:
Yeah, it was interesting. I had to use Dr. Google to try. I thought, “Okay, so what do I want this to be?” Something that is acrylic, fit the bill perfectly. And I needed the holes to be very precise. They had to be exactly a scant 1/4 inch. So if you picture a mitered angle, one section of a Y seam, you have that one angled edge going to a straight edge. So there had to be a dot there that was at the scant 1/4-inch mark. And then I needed a square corner because you’re sewing the border piece to your quilt center, which is hopefully square or has square corners on it. So I needed a square corner. And then recently I’ve added another dot to it that is at the outer tip of that angle. So it would be the outer edge of the quilt where that angled steam would be.
And that dot is for making Lone Star quilts that are not just Lone Star, that are broken star. Because I do a lot of those too. So a broken star quilt is like the eight diamonds in the center, and then it has another ring of diamonds around that. Well, that adds another level of sewing from seam to seam. And I had a pattern out a few years ago that was quite popular, and as I was making my sample, I thought, “I’m using my E-Z Miter Lone Star tool for this because it was a broken star quilt, so Lone Star based, but how to mark those outer tips? So okay, let’s add another dot to the tool, which I just did, because I just ordered another batch of them. So now the tool has three dots in it. So it’s super handy for marking any type of Lone Star, broken star, Star of Bethlehem, whatever. They go by many names, but it’s super handy for that.
So I would say probably it might get more use for doing Lone Stars even than mitered borders. So I have the advantage of being close to a major center, Toronto, Canada. And I searched online who might do acrylic cutting, and there happened to be a company that was somewhat local. So I reached out to a few companies, asked them to quote on prices, and they sent me back information. And then I used one of them, chose one of them, and proceeded with that, and then figured out what the instructions needed to look like because the instructions really are key. The acrylic, it’s there. And the instructions, they’re there for anybody. Anybody can make the mitered borders using the instructions, but the tool really makes the life easier. It’s plunking that tool down in the corner and marking it. So I just started producing them.

Carolina Moore:
Was that a scary moment for you as you were like, “Okay, I’ve come up with this idea.” I think it’s amazing. I’ve talked to a couple of friends, they think it’s amazing. Were you confident that the quilting world was going to say, “Oh, this is amazing,” or were you nervous about making that jump?

Patti:
Oh, a little nervous. A little nervous, I must say. It’s a leap of faith.

Carolina Moore:
Yes.

Patti:
Having a batch. And a batch, my first batch, it just made economical sense. The manufacturer said, “Well, I can give you a volume discount if you order this number.” Well, of course. So there was my first batch of 1,500 tools. So now-

Carolina Moore:
Oh, wow! But it’s one of those, the more you buy, the more you save. And it’s like, yes-

Patti:
Yes, exactly.

Carolina Moore:
But the bigger check that I’m going to write and that I am going to cross my fingers that I won’t have 1,500 units sitting in my garage for the next 20 years.

Patti:
And so fortunately, I’ve sold them and I’ve had my second batch produced. I’m partway through selling those as well. So this is working. It’s just a case of getting the word out and there are… You know you’re reaching out to people, interviewing different people. There are thousands of gadgets out there. It’s just a case of finding the gadgets and knowing what the gadget does. For me, trying to show people what the gadget does. When it’s hanging on a shelf in a store, how can I make this jump out at someone so they’ll say, “Oh, what is that? I need it.”

Carolina Moore:
Yes.

Patti:
And I come from a marketing background, so I’m very aware of that, and interested, how can I market this? How can I make the packaging say what it is? Because there are some products that we use that just don’t sell themselves, like interfacing. Interfacing sits under the counter at the quilt shop. You have to ask for it because a bolt of interfacing on the shelf does not look interesting. So quilters will not, they’ll walk right past it. So how can I bring my gadget to quilters’ attentions when they’re walking past a wall of gadgets in a quilt shop?

Carolina Moore:
I mean, the notions wall is my favorite part in a quilt shop and looking at the notions. But it’s so easy to make an assumption about what an notion does. Like, “Oh, that’s a pen,” but it’s not just a pen. It’s a magic pen, and it does a magic thing. But I don’t know what that magic is. If I just gloss over and go, “Oh, that looks like a pen.” It must be a pen. And then I move on to the next one.

Patti:
So it’s up to me as the manufacturer of that to make my packaging tell the story about what this does, because I can’t be there to show people. So how can I get them to pick it up and want to buy it?

Carolina Moore:
Wouldn’t it be amazing if we could just be in all the quilt shops and hold people’s hands and say, “Look, this is how this works. This is how we’re going to do this.”

Patti:
Yes, my next step is putting that QR code on that takes them to a video that shows what it does. So that’s right there on the front of the packaging.

Carolina Moore:
Oh, that’s smart. Definitely smart.

Patti:
Yeah.

Carolina Moore:
So you’ve launched this notion, it’s out in the world. People are loving it, buying it. They can get it from their local quilt shops. And so anyone who’s listening and is intrigued by this, I definitely encourage you to go to your local quilt shop and ask them if they either have it in stock or if not, if they’ll special order it. Because most quilt shops are excited to special order a product for you to get it in your hands, but also to get it on their shelves. Because if it’s something that you’re excited about, chances are it’s something that other customers will be excited about as well. But is this a bug for you now that you like, “Oh, I love creating notions and I want to create more,” or is it, “This is my notion, I love this notion and I don’t need to create any more after this”?

Patti:
Right now I’m thinking I don’t have a burning desire to create any more. But having said that, this notion was born out of a need to help realtors accomplish something and to make their life easier. And if I find down the road of my quilting journey that there is another need that isn’t being met, and I can develop a product that will help meet that need, then by all means, I’ll jump in and figure out how to go about doing it.
I have the advantage of having a lot of contacts in the quilting industry through my association with Northcott and speaking to many, many pattern designers over the years who have designed patterns for Northcott. And I was fortunate to be able to reach out to a couple of them who I knew were already doing something along these lines, and they willingly shared information with me, which was invaluable to help me market the tool, to help me source people to make the tool for me, because I don’t have an acrylic cutter. So I need to source that out, have somebody manufacture that, but I can certainly do the packaging. Okay, where do I find the packaging supplies, all of that good stuff? All the information that I really need to make my product easy for the stores to sell and easy for consumers to use.

Carolina Moore:
Yes, I love that. So what’s next for you then? What are you working on?

Patti:
Oh, life is very busy.

Carolina Moore:
I love it.

Patti:
I know my husband is retired. He retired seven years ago. So part of… Like I said, I wear many hats. I’m part-time retired. I’m part-time working with Northcott and part-time Patti’s Patchwork. I must say that Patti’s Patchwork seems to be taking up almost full-time, so it’s hard to squeeze everything else in.
But one of those things that I’ve been fortunate enough to do, especially recently, is teach on some quilting cruises. So there are two quilting cruises coming up in 2024 that I’m teaching on. One is with World of Quilts Travel, Deb Roberts, in February, going to the Caribbean. And the other one is an Alaskan cruise that is first week of September, and that is through a local shop, Watergirl Quilts. And she’s just getting all the ducks in a row for that. And as you know, quilting and cruising is a perfect fit. Because you were just on a quilting cruise that you taught on, and how fun it is to be able to do two wonderful things at the same time, see the world on a cruise ship, which is so luxurious, and also spend time quilting, especially on those days at sea when there might not be so much to do.
So filling those days with quilting with like-minded wonderful individuals is just a fantastic way. I’ve met some great friends over the years that I’ve been teaching on quilting cruises, so I’m doing that plus doing a lot of pattern designing. I’ve probably come out with about 15 new patterns every year, so that’s keeping me busy and off the streets.

Carolina Moore:
Keeping you busy and off the streets. That’s funny. But that’s not so much a concern with us quilters. I think all of our extra cash is being spent on fabric and on fun notions and on things like quilting cruises, which I did my first quilting cruise back in January, and then at the time of recording this, I’m getting ready to go on my second in August, at the end of August. So yes, for sure, two loves of travel, seeing the world and quilting, and hanging out with quilting friends and meeting new quilting friends. So I guess it’s like eight loves all at the same time, all wrapped in one ship where you get to see all these different places without having to repack your suitcase between every port. I definitely love that.

Patti:
Yes.

Carolina Moore:
Yep. Although the one thing that unsettled me, my first quilting cruise was also my first ever cruise. And I’m not a high anxiety person, but I was finding myself that first day especially, and then into that second day, having a lot of anxiety while teaching. And it would just be these kind of sudden waves of anxiety that would hit me. And it wasn’t just the anxiety that was bothering me, but was I had anxiety about having anxiety because why is this happening and this is not normal for me? And I realized that those bouts of anxiety coincided with the rough seas that we were having a little bit on that journey.

Patti:
Oh, yeah.

Carolina Moore:
Because I mean, you’re in Canada, but I grew up in California and live in California. And in California when the ground moves, you dive under a table because there’s an earthquake and you don’t want the ceiling to fall on your head.
And that’s what we’ve been trained from kindergarten on up is that you duck and cover, we had duck and cover drills, you go underneath your desk. And so when we were having these seas that, I mean they weren’t… You could totally still quilt, but you kind of feel your feet kind of rolling underneath you a little bit, very much like an earthquake. And that’s the anxiety that I was having of you need to be diving under a table right now, Caroline, because the cruise ship is going to be on your head. You’re in a constant earthquake. And once I was able to recognize that, then it was like, “Okay, no, this is not an earthquake.”

Patti:
Then you could enjoy yourself.

Carolina Moore:
Yeah. Well, and I could definitely laugh at myself because it’s funny. I mean, it’s similar to those things that we train ourselves as quilters to be afraid of things. I’ve trained myself to be afraid of the ground moving, but on a boat, it does move a little bit, and that’s okay.

Patti:
It always moves. And then you got your story, you’re standing on the pier and you think, “Why is the pier moving?” But it’s not. You have your sea legs and now everything when you go ashore feels like you’re used to that constant roll that sway back and forth.

Carolina Moore:
Yes. Well, that’s fun. It has been so much fun hanging out with you today. Where can people find you online, and other places that you’re teaching? I mean, you’ve mentioned the two cruises, so definitely people… I’ll put those in the show notes and people can find those and if there’s still tickets available for those, they can book that. But where else can they find you?

Patti:
So my website is pattispatchwork.com. I’m also on Facebook as Patti’s Patchwork, and Instagram, and I have a YouTube channel. I’m hoping to be posting some more videos. I’m a, I guess, a hesitant YouTuber. Getting in front of the camera is, it’s not so easy, but I try because there are things that I do want to share, and I’d like to do a new video to show how to use the E-Z Miter tool that includes the third hole that I now have in the tool. So I will be doing that sometime shortly, and so there’s my YouTube channel as well.

Carolina Moore:
Perfect. I’ll make sure that all those links are in the show notes, and you can find those show notes at ilovenotions.com. Anything else you want to add before we close out the show today?

Patti:
I think this has been fabulous, and I look forward to all of your podcasts so I can find some new notions too, because you can never have enough.

Carolina Moore:
Right. I am a certified notions addict, and I definitely need all the notions. They make my quilting life easier, more fun, and also when I’m quilting with the notions that I know the stories behind and the people behind, it always feels like even if I’m alone in my sewing room, I’m quilting with friends. So that’s definitely fun.

Patti:
Oh, absolutely. That’s a great way to think of it. Excellent.

Carolina Moore:
All right, Patti, thanks so much for hanging out with me today.

Patti:
It was wonderful. Thank you so much.

Carolina Moore:
Friends, that’s our episode for today. I hope you loved it as much as I loved having this conversation. Remember that you can find all the details that we talked about in the show notes, and those are all at ilovenotions.com. And make sure to leave this podcast a review in your favorite podcasting app. Leaving a review will let people know that maybe they should listen as well, and it will help the podcast algorithm show this podcast to other people who love notions just as much as we do. Friends, that’s all I have for you today, but I will see you right here real soon. Bye for now.

The post Patti Carey of Patti’s Patchwork appeared first on i love notions.

Her quilting passion grew when she moved to Egypt. With her friends, she began a quilting group that was later named “Quilters in deNile”.  Now a resident of Massachusetts, Debbie continues in many quilting endeavors. She designed the tool “Brilliant Bindings”.  In 1999, a dear quilting friend Lil Griffin showed her a binding ending technique so the seam was the same as all others in a continuous binding.  She made her own template to simplify the process and used it to teach others for years.  She was encouraged to put the idea into form and had Brilliant Bindings made in 2007.

Her Brilliant Bindings tool shape, a trapezoid, proved to be a great jumping off point for many unique quilt patterns.  Any of her patterns with “Brilliant” or “Tool” in the title uses Brilliant Bindings as a cutting template to make the quilt.

In 2017, Hex-a-ma-jig was created.  A 3 1/2″ half hexie shape template with more lines for more cutting options – Half Hexie, Full Hexie, Partial Hexie.  The Hexie family grew in 2018 with Hex-a-ma-jig Jr. for 2 1/2″ strips and Hex-a-Mini for 2″ strips was introduced in 2021.

Her self-published books include:
Construction and Production – Making and Binding a Quilt on a Longarm, Midarm or Shortarm
Chenille Made Easy on a Longarm
Hexie Speak – Say it with Hexies  A Design Workbook

Show Notes:

Find Debbie Wendt’s Website Here
Follow Debbie on Facebook here
Check out Debbie’s Instagram here
Subscribe to Debbie’s YouTube here

Listen to the Episode:

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Transcript of the interview with Debbie Wendt:

Carolina Moore:
I Love Notions and I’m guessing that you do too. Hey there friend. It’s Carolina Moore, your favorite sewing and quilting YouTuber, and now podcaster here with another episode. So today on the podcast we have, Debbie Wendt from Debbie Wendt Quilting. She has a couple notions actually this she’s going to tell us about, but I’m going to let her introduce herself first and tell us about how she got started in quilting. But welcome to the podcast, Debbie.

Debbie Wendt:
Thank you Carolina for having me. Yeah, so back in 2007, I finally got a tool for binding that I was happy with and that’s actually when I started my business Wendt Quilting. From there, I’ve come forward to 2023. It seems like a very long time at this point. And I was a home economics teacher by I guess you would say education and that was my first job. I taught home ec.

Carolina Moore:
What grades did you teach home ec to?

Debbie Wendt:
I taught seventh and eighth grade for seven years and then I bumped up to the high school for one year and I did the foods classes. So it was definitely out of the sewing realm of it, but still incorporated under the home economics umbrella. And then in 1992 there he was across a crowded room was Bob Wendt. So we got married in ’93 and I quit being a teacher, moved to Cairo, Egypt and that’s actually where I started teaching quilting. It was a way to sew without having to fit clothes. So it fit right in with my love of sewing and fabric. And then as I mentioned, the tool came several years after that. So that’s how I got started in the business.

Carolina Moore:
So I want to go back. So you moved to Egypt and this is in the early ’90s, so this is before the widespread internet where you could Google things easily and it was also the time when long distance calls were really expensive. So making a big move like that, that can be really isolating for some people.

Debbie Wendt:
Yeah, absolutely. At the time it was a $1.50 a minute, so we had a very expensive long distance relationship when that started. My parents were actually living there. My dad was working on a joint venture with two engineering firms and my husband Bob was actually working with my dad. So as far as internet, yeah, pretty much non-existent. The big old clunky computers. We finally did get internet in Egypt and I don’t remember what year, but it was I’m guessing the mid to late ’90s and any fabric, good fabric, the Egyptian cotton is exported. So any good fabrics we brought back in our suitcases when we went home for the summer. So there’s several companies that got lots of business during that time.

Carolina Moore:
That’s funny. So the cotton was then grown in Egypt, exported to the US where you bought it and then brought it back to Egypt as finished goods for you to be able to make quilts with?

Debbie Wendt:
Right, exactly. There was fabric there, they would tell you it was cotton even if it wasn’t. So there was a lot of guessing what you got, some of the tests to make sure that it was cotton. We didn’t go into all of that with some of the vendors. We just knew where to go. A street of the tent makers, the Egyptian tent makers was one spot that we knew we could get really nice cotton fabric.

Carolina Moore:
So you learned all the secrets. So were you part of a guild then in Egypt? How did you learn? How did you pick up quilting?

Debbie Wendt:
There was a guild, but it was more of a church related guild. We had different groups that made things for a Christmas bazaar that we did once a year to raise funds for local charities. We called it Maadi Women’s Guild, M-A-A-D-I. That was the area that I lived in, but it was more of a church organization to help with supporting charities. As far as quilting goes, we did start a quilting group and I did teach quilting at was called Community Services Association in Maadi, so it was a place that newcomers could go, they would teach newcomers, they had classes and eventually I did offer some quilting classes, more beginner just to get people interested and learning about the basics of quilting.

Carolina Moore:
Oh fun. So how long did you end up living in Egypt?

Debbie Wendt:
It was eight years total. So when I first moved there it was four years. We went to Louisiana for two and then they asked if we would go back and that was about the year 2000. So we went back for four more years. I’m originally a Kansas City, Missouri girl and I now live in Massachusetts.

Carolina Moore:
You’ve really been all over.

Debbie Wendt:
I have been, yes.

Carolina Moore:
I won’t ask you to pick a favorite. That’s not fair at all.

Debbie Wendt:
Probably each one at the time.

Carolina Moore:
Oh, that’s great that you love the moment you were in when you were in that moment. I love that.

Debbie Wendt:
Yeah, Egypt was tough, but yet that challenge was so rewarding when we were there.

Carolina Moore:
So you picked up quilting, you started teaching quilting. Did you teach quilting when you lived in Louisiana as well or was it just while you were in Egypt?

Debbie Wendt:
Yes, I did. There was a quilt shop in West Monroe called Quilt N’ Stitch, I believe they’re still in business and I worked for the shop for a year. I actually learned how to longarm quilt at that store and then I taught some classes for them and then there was a guild. And I did teach, I’m thinking probably one or two classes during that time I was there.

Carolina Moore:
So for most people in the industry, they start out as consumers, as quilters, as hobbyists, and then at some point maybe they start with pattern design. That’s generally like a first foray into the business of quilting. Is designing a pattern, was that true for you?

Debbie Wendt:
Exactly, yes. When I started teaching, I was looking at other people’s patterns. I was looking at books and the light bulb went off that I could write a pattern. I have ideas using at the time… Well still to this day I use a lot of blocks that are already out there in the public domain and then as they say, make it your own. So I worked with design, with layout, different color combinations, changing up where colors went. So yeah, absolutely, that’s how I did start and wrote my first pattern and then it kind of went from there. The tool actually was kind of joint with that and the timing. So the tool was what actually brought me into what I would say the big quilt world.

Carolina Moore:
So tell me about the tool.

Debbie Wendt:
So the tool is Brilliant Bindings and it’s the original trapezoid shape tool for bindings. It is to do your perfect Mitre corners to finish those tail ends and then because the tool is a trapezoid shape, I did quarter inch lines across it. So you can use it as a template for different patterns. So if you look at a quilt block and see maybe a rectangle with a half square triangle on the end of it, if I combine that into one piece, that’s the shape of what my tool looks like and then full color instructions and I’ve got video online on how to use Brilliant Bindings.

Carolina Moore:
So what was that moment where you said “There needs to be a solution,” or “I want to create this tool”? What was that process for you?

Debbie Wendt:
Thanks for asking that because I forget to include that part. I learned this technique from a quilter down in Louisiana where she showed me how she marked the end at a 45 and then she added a half an inch. And in teaching it myself to other people, it was difficult for people to understand, okay, where’s that 45 line in comparison to the edge of the ruler, even though we do have lines on our rulers with those marks.
So I made myself a little plastic template for my own use and my dear friend Barbara Chainey from England, she’s a teacher and well-known author in England. As I said, she’s a friend of mine and I was showing her what I had and she said, “Debbie, everybody else needs this too.” So that was the moment of, okay, it’s not only for me, most everybody puts a binding on a quilt and this can help them to take the guesswork out of those finishing ends. Instead of just shoving that fabric underneath and the binding and having all that bulk, we make that last seam look like all the other seams in the binding.

Carolina Moore:
That’s so clever. I love that. Okay, so you learned the technique and you wanted to make the tool. What was that process like of going from I have this idea for this tool to actually having a tool in your hands?

Debbie Wendt:
Yeah, we’re talking early 2000s, so there wasn’t, well in my eyes, I didn’t think there was a ton of tools other than the big companies. So I had to think about, okay, who makes tools number one, and will they accept someone else’s drawing? There was a couple of companies that I went through. I was not happy with one, so I kept looking for the company that best fit my needs. And I ended up, at the time I was in, probably… No, I was here in Massachusetts, I found Rulersmith way out in Washington State and they made the Omnigrid Omnigrip rulers. So I actually was out there visiting my aunt was able to tour their facilities and showed him my idea. Of course we have the legalities of proprietary information and they drew it up in their CAD program and then I got to go through the process of “Yes, move this line here. No, that’s okay.” They made me a prototype and we went from there.

Carolina Moore:
And so then you made the leap into, “Okay, I’m going to write an order for this and hope that people love it as much as my friends and I do.”

Debbie Wendt:
Exactly. So the process was finding a company writing directions, and at that point I really hadn’t done much. So it was learning how to use a program on my computer to write instructions, finding a printer that would print my covers, finding pattern bag companies that all of this would go into. A lot of preliminary behind the scenes before, as you well know, having a tool out there. Before you actually get to put it in front of the public eye.

Carolina Moore:
Yes, a lot of weeks, months, sometimes even years of logistics and sorting out before you can get to the point of I can talk about this and it’s a real thing.

Debbie Wendt:
Right.

Carolina Moore:
So you order them, you got them out in the world. Do you remember what the initial response was?

Debbie Wendt:
I immediately put it with Checker Distributors. So they took it right off the bat, which hindsight, I didn’t realize how exciting that… Well, I knew it was exciting, but you hear of designers now going to distributors and just pitching your idea to them. I went to Quilt Market to bring it out even further into the quilt world. And that was two years after it had already been into Checker and I realized I needed a website. I didn’t have it at that point. Social media was a more, what? In its infancy. So getting those things started, it’s much different now with getting something out there because you can put it on Facebook, you can put it on Instagram, boom. But we didn’t have any of that when I started. So it was a lot of word of mouth going to Quilt Market and then going through checker and keeping things current because I had the tool. Then it was like, what else can you use it for? And I started designing patterns using that tool as a cutting template.

Carolina Moore:
So I saw that you have, this is the Brilliant Bindings tool and there’s also a version for longarm quilters. What would be the difference for a longarm quilter needing a different version of the tool?

Debbie Wendt:
So Brilliant Bindings, what I call eighth inch thick for all quilters is just that. It’s the regular tool thickness that we get with any of our rotary cutting tools. Then for Brilliant Bindings a quarter inch thick, it’s a quarter inch thick acrylic. That’s the thickness that you need to use with your longarm or now we’re doing it with our domestic machines. We weren’t at the time that this came out, because your hopping foot can hop up over that thinner version. So with the quarter inch thick, your hopping foot runs alongside it and it’s much less chance of that tool slipping under your hopping foot and getting hit by the needle. So for the long-arm version, that’s actually how I came into teaching and what I would say is the big teaching shows. I taught for MQX and did a class on finishing your bindings while your quilt was still on your longarm frame.

Carolina Moore:
So the way that… I don’t have a longarm, and I think most people probably don’t have a longarm, although they’re becoming much more common nowadays, which is fabulous. But I finish free motion quilting my quilt or using my walking foot to quilt my quilt. Then I take it to my floor with my cutting mat and my rotary cutter ruler, and then I square it all up and then I attach my binding. But here the quilt is on the frame of the longarm. It’s been quilted and before taking it off the frame and squaring it up, you’re already attaching the binding?

Debbie Wendt:
Correct. Yeah. So my example that I give people when they say, “Oh, but I don’t square it up.” Well, you can actually square it up on your frame by drawing your lines. So if your corner is a bit wonky, you can draw a line to square that up on your frame and then you have that perfect edge to attach the binding to because you’re not removing any of that batting or backing that’s extending beyond your quilt top. So you can actually create what will be your edge. By putting it on the frame you don’t have to push it under your machine, your domestic machine. You can do your perfect Mitre corners, right there.
There is a lot of rolling your quilt back and forth on your liters because your machine can only go so far with those poles. And then going across the bottom and the top, it’s one fell swoop and I do it by hand. I don’t lock it into a channel lock or anything like that because as we all know, fabric moves and I want it to be as precise on the quilt as it is in front of me. So yeah, it takes out a couple of steps and then it takes out having to push it under your domestic machine. Because that gets a lot of weight and it does get heavy.

Carolina Moore:
For sure. All of us who have sewn on our binding know the struggle of pulling that whole quilt up onto the table and getting it underneath. And when you’re talking channel locks on a longarm. That’s something that we don’t have on our domestic machines, but it’s a way to kind of lock a horizontal or vertical line in place so that when you are pulling the machine across the frame of the longarm, it stays right in that channel. Right in that straight, perfect line. But you’re saying that you don’t lock it in place because you want to be able to eyeball exactly where that binding is going on there?

Debbie Wendt:
Yes, exactly. If you’ve got a seam that you’re going up over, something like that, you want to just make sure that it stays with what’s happening on the quilt as opposed to where the machine thinks it’s going to go.

Carolina Moore:
There are definitely times in quilting where we the maker are better than the machine doing its quote “perfect” way of sewing it, for sure. Yeah.

Debbie Wendt:
Yeah, I agree. Good point.

Carolina Moore:
So I noticed that the Brilliant Bindings tool is not the only tool that you have. There’s a Hex-a-ma-jig tool as well.

Debbie Wendt:
Yes, there is.

Carolina Moore:
Could you tell me a little bit about the Hex-a-ma-jig?

Debbie Wendt:
Absolutely. So Hex-a-ma-jig I designed in 2017 and it’s 10 years after Brilliant Bindings. There was a point where, okay, how much more, how many more patterns can I do with that trapezoid shape of Brilliant Bindings? And I’ve always been in love with hexagons and I think a lot of people have those grandmother flower gardens, some of your triangles, your diamonds, those shapes are very intriguing and make for some amazing patterns. So yeah, 2017 I did Hex-a-ma-jig for three and a half inch strips. With that tool, as it says, three and a half inch strips for cutting half hexes. Those half hexes can be sewn one on top of the other to create a full hexie. I do have instructions for using a bigger, wider strip of fabric. So you can create a full hexie. Let’s say you want to do an I spy. There’s also lines on the tool for your triangles.
There’s no diamond line, but in the instructions I show you how to create those diamonds because baby blocks, the finished shape is a hexagon. You can do your triangles and diamonds to create those baby blocks and it doesn’t have to have a Y-seam. It can actually be vertically pieced to create baby blocks. Edge pieces, one of the things when I first started doing a hexie and you have that, what I would say, a zigzag edge, because your hexagon has that 60 degree, I didn’t like wasting the fabric of chopping that off when I was finished. So there’s lines on the tool that you can actually cut those edge pieces beforehand and then once you sew those rows across, you have your finished edge instead of going back and cutting them off.

Carolina Moore:
Oh, I love that because sometimes you can only get so many units out of a strip and then you’re going to cut off half that unit anyway, so why did you need a full unit? And also if you’re using scrappy fabric, sometimes the scrap is big enough to make an edge piece, but your template is only designed to make the full unit. So this lets you get more out of your fabric every time.

Debbie Wendt:
Yeah, exactly. Exactly. And then in the directions, people like things, they like things for free as we all do.

Carolina Moore:
Well, yes.

Debbie Wendt:
I went ahead and put in six different quilt layouts using the tool with some of the different shapes. So you’ve got your grandmother’s flower garden, you’ve got one where they’re all smooshed together. I call it a mixed flower garden. You can do your full hexes with your Y-seams but you can also do those hexies to look like they’ve been created as a full hexie with two halves. And by creating two halves, one on top of the other, we can strip piece that and that is in the booklet as well as a freebie on my website. And then those good old baby blocks or tumbling blocks with that vertical strip piecing and seven sister star is actually created with diamonds. But when we split that diamond in half, we have triangles in diamonds. So again, we don’t have to have it sewn together as a Y-seam or that set-in seam. You can actually create triangles and diamonds to get that same block.

Carolina Moore:
My brain is just buzzing with ideas. There’s so many different ways that you can use the tool. So this is the Hex-a-ma-jig, and I’m curious because you already had the Brilliant Bindings tool for a decade before you launched the Hex-a-ma-jig. Was it less nerve wracking to launch a second tool, or was it just totally part of doing business or was it you were already really confident because you had a successful tool and so launching a second one was a breeze?

Debbie Wendt:
I’m going to say a little bit of a mix. I wasn’t afraid to put it out there. I knew at that point I made it an edge tool instead of the lines printed on it and I went to someone else to do that work. I went to a different manufacturer. But there are hexie tools out there. There are half hexagon shapes, there are triangles, diamonds. Have been for years because this is a very well-known shape and I didn’t want to step on anybody’s toes that were already have a tool like that. So I made sure, this is the nerve wracking part of it. I made sure mine had different lines. It has only one size on my particular tool, so it wasn’t a multi size tool that you see a lot of when you see hexagon shapes. And I created it so I felt it was a little different, a little unique. Yes, there are other tools out there, but I made it different that it did what I wanted it to do that I didn’t see in some of the other tools.

Carolina Moore:
That need of, it’s not just to create a tool to create a tool, but creating a tool that fits a hole that you’ve found in trying to make these projects.

Debbie Wendt:
Yeah, exactly.

Carolina Moore:
So it’s available in a couple different sizes, right?

Debbie Wendt:
Yes. So Hex-a-ma-jig was the first one for three and a half inch strips, and then there are so many jelly roll patterns and options out there. I did Hex-a-ma-jig Jr. And that came a year later for your two and a half inch jelly roll strips or strip units. It’s kind of like Kleenex and tissues, jelly rolls. So a lot of companies have their own version of that two and a half inch strip, so that was Jr. So it was fun to take a size fabric that was already out in the quilt world and say, “Here’s a tool that you can use to do something different than what you’ve already seen with simple straight, for lack of a better word, straight rectangles and squares.”
You’re cutting your half hexie shape to create some really cool things. And then just, let’s see. Well, it happened during COVID. But in 2021 I did Hexa Mini for two inch strips because I sat and colored in paper during COVID and I started looking at inspirations of when you go to an old town and you see their entryways, a lot of them have tile work like with Welcome or the name of their store or what date they were established, and it was the light bulb moment.
I can do letters and numbers with those half hexie shapes in a strip pieced layout and create letters and numbers and some really fun borders. So Hexa Mini happened for the two inch strips to make a letter that wasn’t the size of a bed because Hex-a-ma-jig with the three and a half inch strips was very large for the letters. Jr. was still, in my opinion, too large, but the many seemed to be a good size to get a letter that was very visible on a quilt. And so I did a book of letters and numbers and borders called Hexie Speak and Hexa Mini fit right in to accompany that book. So you didn’t have to cut out paper templates. You could use Hexa Mini with the acrylic template to make those designs in Hexie Speak – Say it with Hexies.

Carolina Moore:
Oh, that’s so smart.

Debbie Wendt:
A very long answer to a short question, but yes. So now I have three sizes. As of this date I’m probably going to stick with those. I’ve had requests for bigger or smaller, but as we all know, there’s only so small you can go without being a hindrance of making sure you’re not going to cut off a finger when you rotary cut around a piece of acrylic. And going bigger, that template size is more expensive, and is there enough people out there that are interested in something bigger than what I created with the three and a half inch Hex-a-ma-jig?

Carolina Moore:
Sure, yep. That’s always the question of I want this thing, but does the world want the thing?

Debbie Wendt:
Exactly.

Carolina Moore:
So you’ve been designing patterns, designing notions, teaching for a while now. What’s next for you? What do you have on the horizon?

Debbie Wendt:
Oh, it’s as I say, keeping it going. People want new. I look back at some of the things I’ve designed, let’s say 10 years ago, even eight years ago. They’re still good patterns, but putting different colors to them really changes up what the look is. I don’t have any new tools on the immediate horizon, although that’s always in your mind, but patterns and possibly little booklet types teaching is my favorite thing to do. That’s how I started. That’s been my love since I went to college and I’d like to do more of that.
I am a vendor at a lot of shows, especially the AQS shows, and I’m usually in Houston for the International Quilt Festival, but it’s trying on your body. I know you’ve vented a few times and-

Carolina Moore:
Yes.

Debbie Wendt:
… it’s a lot of work. It’s a lot of schlepping all of your stuff in and all of your stuff out, and the aesthetics of making it look inviting, and it’s a lot of work. I will continue to do it for a number of years, but there’s a point where, okay, do I want to keep doing that? I am trying to be positive that I’m still young enough and I can do it and I can lift those heavy suitcases and those grid walls. So I’ll continue to do the shows. But as I mentioned, teaching is my love and that’s what I’ve loved to do is just go out and teach.

Carolina Moore:
Yes, teaching is definitely fun. It’s all that interaction that you get at a show, but without having to carry quite so much product around.

Debbie Wendt:
Right.

Carolina Moore:
Well, I know that folks can go to their local quilt shops, and I always say support your local quilt shops whenever you can. So you can go to their local quilt shops and if their shop doesn’t already carry the Brilliant Bindings tool or the Hex-a-ma-jig, they can ask for the shop to special order it. Most shops are happy to do special orders, and also shops generally love it because then they get introduced to a new tool that maybe they didn’t know about before, and that’s how we get new tools into all different kinds of shops. But where can they find you online?

Debbie Wendt:
Yes, I do have a website under the business name Wendt Quilting, and it’s a work in progress. As we talked earlier, I didn’t grow up with computers, so I’m kind of self-taught, and so I’m just going to call it a work in progress. But there’s where you can find all the products that I have created and have out there in the quilt world. I am on Instagram, and that is my name, debbiewendtquilting.
I do have a Facebook page under the business name Wendt Quilting. That’s the big three. I say it every time and I’m going to hold myself to it, is to do some more videos because I do have a few out there. I have done some when we’ve done Meet the Teachers, the International Quilt Festival, when I’ve taught there, and then we have little videos of these are the classes. But some how-tos because that’s one of the questions I get when I demo at shows is do you have a video on how to do this? And the answer is yes for the tool, but I don’t go into, “Here’s this quilt, here’s how you make it.” So it’s on the list

Carolina Moore:
And videos are great.

Debbie Wendt:
Will be coming. Yeah.

Carolina Moore:
Yeah, I love videos for connecting with people and being able to show and tell at the same time. So as a home ec teacher, I’m sure you understand the different learning modalities and how all of our brains process information in slightly different ways. So the more ways we can get that information, the easier it is for us to consume it.

Debbie Wendt:
Exactly. And photos. Well, there wasn’t a photo for that step, so I didn’t read it. So it’s something as the quilters and as the consumers, we try to make sure that you do understand all of that with the instructions and put in as much as we can. But as you mentioned, videos is a lot of times the aha moments.

Carolina Moore:
I’m definitely guilty of looking through the images and saying, “Oh, I can do that,” based on the photos and then getting halfway through and then saying, “This is not working. Let me go ahead and read those instructions as well. “

Debbie Wendt:
Right, exactly. I have friends that do that. That’s why I… They know who they are.

Carolina Moore:
Yes. My overconfidence maybe or just a, oh, it’s fine. It’ll be fine. And it’s just fabric and it’s just thread. I’m very comfortable with my seam ripper. If it doesn’t work the first time, I can rip it out and do it again.

Debbie Wendt:
Exactly.

Carolina Moore:
Well, Debbie, it’s been so fun hanging out with you today. Thank you so much for joining me. I’ll make sure that I have all those links to the places that people can find you in the show notes, and those show notes are at ilovenotions.com if someone is looking for those. But thanks for joining me today on the podcast.

Debbie Wendt:
Thank you so much for having me. It’s been a pleasure. It’s always good to talk quilting and tools.

Carolina Moore:
I agree. Friends, that’s our episode for today. I hope you loved it as much as I loved having this conversation. Remember that you can find all the details that we talked about in the show notes, and those are all at ilovenotions.com. And make sure to leave this podcast a review in your favorite podcasting app. Leaving it a review will help the podcast algorithm show this podcast to other people who love notions just as much as we do. Friends, that’s all I have for you today, but I will see you right here real soon. Bye for now.

The post Debbie Wendt – Wendt Quilting appeared first on i love notions.

Jane offers free-motion quilting classes using home machines, mid-arms, or longarms.  These classes enable quilters to finish their own quilts. And offers private long arm quilting lessons. She is a Handi Quilter Ambassador, an Island Batik Ambassador and a Superior Threads Certified Threadologist.

She offers free motion quilting workbooks, wholecloth panels, and quilting rulers.

Show Notes:

Get details on Jane’s Lectures and Classes here
Sign up for her class at AQS Quilt Week Paducah
Find Jane’s website here
Subscribe to Jane’s Youtube Channel here.
Follow along with Jane on Facebook
Check out Jane’s Instagram

Listen to the Episode:

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Transcript of the interview with Jane Hauprich:

Carolina Moore:
I love notions, and I’m guessing that you do too. Hey there, friend. It’s Carolina Moore, your favorite sewing and quilting YouTuber and now, podcaster here with another episode.
My guest today is Jane Hauprich, and she is a longarmer, but we’re going to get into that in a little bit. First, I want to learn a little bit about Jane and how she got started in this fabulous quilting journey that we’re all in. So, Jane, welcome to the podcast.

Jane:
Thanks for having me.

Carolina Moore:
How did you get started in quilting? Did you find quilting? Did quilting find you?

Jane:
I think it was like the late 1990s. There was a group of women that were teaching younger women how to sew or piece quilts, and I decided to join in the group. It was a little church group, and so I learned how to piece quilts. I was a young mom with three kids, and I didn’t get to do a lot of it, but I knew I really loved it. So, that’s basically where I started.
I did piece when I could. My problem being is that I had to figure out a way how to get my quilts quilted. At first, I worked on basically small things, but I was really hooked into the whole piecing thing. Then, because I was a single mom, and I really couldn’t afford to send my quilts out to be quilted, I had to teach myself how to get them quilted. I did a lot of straight-line quilting and stitch-in-the-ditch at first until I discovered free-motion quilting later on.

Carolina Moore:
You were quilting, and so you were free-motion quilting your own quilts on your just regular sewing machine?

Jane:
Yes, a regular domestic sewing machine. Fast forward a few years later, I was at a quilt show, and I kept on passing by the Handi Quilter booth. I was drawn to their stationary, sit-down longarm, and I kept on going back. Finally, I would say to my friends, “I’m going back to that booth. You go on without me.” And I would go back and sit down and play. Like I said, this was a few years later, so I ended up leaving the show with a sit-down longarm.
Then, I had all that throat space, and I was just thrilled. I did that for about three years. I just did my own quilts, and I just really loved … There was something about moving that fabric around underneath the needle that really, it just brought me peace and joy. So, I did that. Then, fast forward a few years later, and I decided to take a local class at a quilt shop. It was a one-day thing about how to start your own longarming business, and it really intrigued me.
At the time, I was working as a phlebotomist in the hospital, and I wasn’t thrilled with the schedules I was getting, so I decided to take the plunge. I tell people I traded one needle for another needle.

Carolina Moore:
Yeah, I was going to say phlebotomist is a whole different kind of needle.

Jane:
It sure is. I knew I couldn’t do customer quilts very quickly on a stationary longarm, so I upgraded, and I got a movable-`head longarm and a 12-foot frame, and I did all free-motion. I just started there, and I started … But I have to tell you, because I’m sure everybody faces this, is that after the retailer came and set up my machine for me in my home, I couldn’t go in that room for two weeks. I was scared to death of it. I literally would open the door a crack and peek in and think, “Oh, my gosh, what did I do?” And I’d shut the door and walk away. Eventually, I overcame that. But it’s scary. It’s a big machine.

Carolina Moore:
Knowing that, but then stepping back for a moment, you took this class about how to start a longarming business. What was it about that class that made you go, “Okay, yes, I want to jump into this.”

Jane:
I think it’s just because I do enjoy piecing quilts, but I think I love the quilting of them more. So, the thought of being able to do that for myself and for others just really intrigued me because I find that free-motion is where my passion lies, and I seem to have a good knack for it. So, that just was something that drew me in. The thought of working for myself, and while that’s not always easy, I just figured I’d jump in and give it a try.

Carolina Moore:
Can you change your mind later? When you jump in and buy a longarm is it like you’re really jumping in with both feet, or can you wade into it? Is all or nothing or kind of halfway?

Jane:
Well, I jumped in with both feet. I just started. I loaded fabric. I had already had experience with moving the fabric underneath of my needle on the stationary and on my domestic machine, which I still to this day do. I had the idea of how the designs went, and so it was just a matter of now driving the machine.
That was in late 2012 when my machine was delivered, and it was in early 2013 at a local quilt shop that somebody handed me a quilt and said, “Please custom quilt this for me.” I was scared to death. It was different. It was different because it was somebody else’s quilt. It was different because they wanted custom work opposed to just doing the same design over the entire quilt, and I was all free-motion and ruler work. So, it really did help me.
I find that each quilt that I get to longarm teaches me a little something new that I didn’t know before, and it’s also taught me to be a better piecer. I don’t think I was a very good piecer before, but after seeing quilts up close made by other people, it’s made me more conscientious about how I piece my quilts.

Carolina Moore:
I was really excited to have a longarmer on the season of the podcast because although it’s, I love Notions, it’s I love notions in the context of I love quilting. I learned quilting piecemeal as we do. You take a class. You learn a technique. You read a book. You learn another technique, and you try it out and see how it goes. And I had started with my quilts.
My first quilts were tied, but then doing walking-foot quilting on them, just stitch-in-the-ditch, walking-foot quilting on my quilts. So, the first time that I gave a quilt top to a longarmer to longarm it for me, I told her, “It doesn’t need to be fancy. Just do stitch-in-the-ditch.” She was very kind. Tammy held my hand and said, “Carolina, so stitch-in-the-ditch is not the easiest. It’s easiest for a domestic machine, but it is not the easiest for a longarm. If you want something simple, direct, and easy for a longarmer, that would be edge-to-edge quilting.” That’s the pantographs that go all the way across it.
That transition from being a home quilter, doing it all yourself to, “Hey, I want to bring someone else in on this process … ” And quilting is a community sport anyway, so I’m going to bring someone else in. I’m going to ask longarmer to work on this part with me. But now, it’s learning that whole part of what is involved in longarming because it isn’t exactly a direct correlation from doing it on my machine to putting it on a frame.

Jane:
Right, when you’re doing it on your machine and you’re having to sandwich everything together and try and squeeze it in between in the bed of your machine, and a longarmer has the advantage of having that nice frame and loads everything. The backing, the batting, and the top are all loaded separately, so nothing has to be basted, and it’s just such an easy thing.
And I do. I have upgraded since my very first machine. I do have a computerized system now. I do not use it a whole lot. Still, my passion lies with free-motion, but I do use it. I find that I do a lot of custom quilting for people, and that puts a lot of stress on the body, so I try and schedule an edge-to-edge, computerized job in between each of my custom jobs. And that way it gives me a little bit of a break in between.

Carolina Moore:
Oh, that makes total sense. Absolutely.

Jane:
Yeah.

Carolina Moore:
The other thing that I learned in starting to work with a longarmer is that she was able to give me feedback on my quilts, like having a good relationship with her so she could say, “Hey, have you thought about doing it this way?” You’d mentioned that you became a better piecer by seeing the quilts that were being brought to you and that you’re putting on your longarm. Can you talk about some of those things that you learned or experienced?

Jane:
Sure. Everybody pieces differently, and some people just didn’t pay a whole lot of attention to are their blocks squared up individually before they put their blocks together. So, if they don’t do that, one block might be very full and the other block might be just the right size. So, the longarmer has to try and figure a way to eat up some of that extra space without taking a tuck in the fabric or whatever. And it’s made me realize that squaring up your quilt, your blocks, even though you might only get a little fragment of overage cut off, it’s still a very important step.
Same thing with putting on borders. I am a firm believer on measuring down the middle of the quilt to get and then cut my borders to match that and make them work where because I’ve had quilts given to me where they didn’t do that, and then the border fabric, there’s all this extra yardage in there. One or two inches, I can probably take care of with my quilting and quilt that out, but when you have five, six, seven extra inches in there, that’s really tough to do without taking maybe a pleat in the border fabric. So, it’s just made me be a little bit more careful about those things when I piece.

Carolina Moore:
Sure. I think it was when I first took a quilt to the longarmer that I learned about fullness, which is, yeah, when basically your quilt doesn’t lay flat. If you were to lay it on the ground, that there are parts that are kind of bubbly a little bit, and that’s because the block itself is bigger than the space that you pieced it in, and so the fabric isn’t at equal tension across it. It’s very loose in that area, which will create puckers in your quilt if you just try to quilt straight over it.
But longarmers are magical because a good longarmer will do their best to be able to add more stitching in that area because more stitching kind of sucks up that fabric so that it makes it lie flat.

Jane:
It does. Spray starch and steam work wonders too.

Carolina Moore:
But there’s only so much magic that a longarmer can work on a quilt, yes. When I’m doing a video, and something doesn’t work in quite right, and I say, “Ah, that’ll quilt out,” I’m sure that there are longarmers on the other side watching that video going, “No! No!”

Jane:
Well, and it’s just like the border thing. When I see a border that has some fullness in it or whatever, my first thought is to run some piano keys, which are straight lines, because I can trap some of that extra fullness in between those stitched straight lines, and then that eats up that extra fabric. Yeah, we do learn some tricks along the way, for sure.

Carolina Moore:
Yes, absolutely. If you have a good longarmer they’ll let you know, “Hey, these are the things that I did, and here’s how we can counteract that in the future so that we have more options for quilting instead of having to adjust the quilting to make sure that we’re not putting puckers or pleats in the quilt.”

Jane:
Right.

Carolina Moore:
You were taking on custom work from people that were bringing you their quilt tops, and you were turning them into gorgeous, finished quilts. You’d already mentioned that you do free-motion, but also ruler work. At some point, you decided that you were going to design your own rulers.

Jane:
I did. To backtrack just a little bit, my local quilt shop asked me if I would teach some free-motion quilting on domestic machines, which that’s where I started, so that’s what I thought … I said, “Sure.” So, I developed a curriculum that I thought would be good for beginners, and I started to teach it in my local quilt shop. Everybody seemed to love it. And then in, I think it was 2015, I just had this year that I decided I was going to go for whatever. I am not always very good at stepping out of my comfort zone and going out on a limb, but I decided that year that I was going to apply to some shows to teach and to see what happens because the worst they could tell me was no.
So, I applied to two shows that year, two major shows, and they both picked me up to teach. I was so super excited by that and another-

Carolina Moore:
That’s awesome.

Jane:
It was. It was so good, and I had such a good time. Teaching at shows is so much fun because everybody’s so excited to be there, and it’s always been a great time. But one of the words of wisdom that I had received from another longarmer who taught at shows was you should develop some of your own products to have at shows with you in your classroom.
So, I did develop some rulers, and the reason I did the rulers was because, not just because of that, but because I like smaller rulers that fit well in my hand. And I wanted rulers that would work on domestic machines as well as longarms. So, I did develop a line of rulers for that purpose.

Carolina Moore:
How do you design a quilting ruler? I’ve done a little bit of ruler work, so I have a little bit of an idea of it, but I’m not sure that everyone listening has played either with free-motion quilting and specifically with rulers. How do you figure out the shapes that you’re going to …

Jane:
I wanted a couple nice curves, and so I did develop two curve rulers. My thing, when I am buying a ruler, I’ve always been a thrifty person, and so I didn’t want a ruler that just did one thing. I wanted a ruler. I wanted to have rulers that did multiple things. When I designed my curve ruler, the one side has a nice gentle curve, and the other side has a nice, straight side for straight lines. And it has lots of different markings on it so that you can use it at different angles. That was what was important to me because I’ve seen rulers out there that don’t have much markings, and then it’s hard to know how much you can use them, and they’re very limited to what you can do with them.
So, I developed the two curves, and then I had this other one that was … I love to teach how to quilt feathers, and one of them, the one side kind of looks like a feather spine, and then the other side is straight. That was to help people because people were like, “Well, I don’t even how to do the spine,” so that was the easy way. Okay, well even if you just draw, use this ruler and draw the spine on. At least you can follow that.
Then as the time went by, I added a couple more rulers in there. I added one that has two different size circles or arcs in it and a straight edge. And one that goes around, it’s an appliqué ruler. It’s to help … This would specifically be for a movable-head longarm, but it’s to help guide you and your machine around appliqué.

Carolina Moore:
Okay. Now, most of us in quilting are familiar with rulers for cutting our fabric, but these are quilting rulers, so they’re not for cutting our fabric. They’re for creating stitching lines. Can you describe how a quilting ruler is used?

Jane:
Sure. A quilting ruler is quarter-inch thick for the longarm.

Carolina Moore:
And it’s thicker than a traditional ruler that we would have for cutting.

Jane:
Yes. Absolutely, yes. That is going to butt up against a ruler foot on your longarm, or if you have a domestic machine, you’re going to have a free-motion ruler foot. And that’s going to butt right up against there. The thing I think that when you’re doing rotary cutting, you’re putting your rotary blade right up against the ruler and cutting. But when you’re using a longarm ruler, you have to remember that you’re stitching is actually a quarter-inch away from the edge of the ruler.

Carolina Moore:
Because that distance from the edge of the foot is touching up against the ruler, but then the needle is in the middle of the foot, and so that’s a quarter-inch.

Jane:
Yes. And it does take a while for people to get the hang of that. It really does. It’s funny when I teach a class because they think if they line up the edge of the ruler with the line on the piece of fabric that it should be right there. And it’s not. You have to learn how to judge to keep that far enough away so your stitching hits that line.

Carolina Moore:
Yeah, It’s like a stencil, but instead of stenciling right next to the stencil template, you’re stenciling always a quarter-inch in or a quarter-inch out of the design.

Jane:
Yes. Yeah.

Carolina Moore:
What was the process like for you of getting these rulers made? You just said, “Oh, I think I’m going to make some quilting rulers,” and then the next day they showed up at your doorstep and they were all ready to go, right?

Jane:
No.

Carolina Moore:
No?

Jane:
I wish it was that easy. Fortunately, I had made some friends with some other teachers on the quilting circuit, and I asked a couple of them how they got their rulers manufactured and who they used. This was back several years ago. So, I chose the one person, and unfortunately, he has gone out of business, so I am still trying to figure out what I’m going to do next as far as getting … I have a good supply, but I will need to go and branch off to somebody new.
But I sent my ideas, and I even actually sent some mockups with just some heavy cardboard, and then they put them into their program. We went back and forth with different lines and markings and all until we had it exactly the way I wanted it, and then I was sent some prototypes. I used them for a little while and then gave them the go-ahead to go ahead and print them or make them. So, it was a process.

Carolina Moore:
Oh, sure, absolutely. And then what was that like getting the box of these are the ones that you’re going to be selling and shipping out to people?

Jane:
Well, it’s super cool to think that something that you developed is out there, and people are using it, and it’s helping them. That was my whole goal and everything is just to be able to help people with their quilting. That’s just, again, something I’ve always just loved is wanting to help others love free-motion quilting and ruler work as much as I do.

Carolina Moore:
Now, I am afraid I might be asking you to pick a favorite child, but is there a favorite of the templates that you have? Or if not, is there one that you would say people should start with?

Jane:
I see that question out on social media quite a bit, like “I’m new to longarming and ruler work, what would be some good rulers to get?” I always tell people to get a straight edge and a gentle curve to start out with first and to not spend a lot of money on specialty rulers until they get a feel for first off if they’re going to like it. Rulers can be quite expensive, so just to get a feel for the straight edge and the gentle curve and then branch off from there.
I think my favorite one is my double-curvy ruler. It has a four-inch half circle on one side and a six-inch half circle on the other side, and so you can either use it as just a clamshell or an arc, or you can actually maneuver it and do an entire circle, which it’s just been fun. That happened by a fluke. The way I designed it, just, I don’t know. I was just strolling and doodling and all of a sudden came up with it, and it was perfect, so I really like it a lot.

Carolina Moore:
That’s the best feeling where your brain is ahead of your hands, and by the time it gets to your hands, it’s just done. Your brain has figured it out for you.

Jane:
Yes, definitely. Yeah, it’s just fun to have a product out there, like I said, that can help people, and they can use and love, hopefully, love as much as you do.

Carolina Moore:
Yes, for sure. Now, your rulers are used by longarmers and domestic machine quilters?

Jane:
Yah.

Carolina Moore:
It’s the same rulers. It’s not like if I have a longarm, but I still quilt on my regular sewing machine as well, I don’t need two sets of rulers.

Jane:
No. The only thing I caution people about on domestic machines is if you have a low-shank machine that you keep your rulers, your longarm … You can still use the longarm rulers, but you’re going to want to keep it towards the front and the side of the foot just so that the shank doesn’t come down and hit the ruler from the back. But truly, you wouldn’t want to use it across the back underneath the shank anyway. But they work perfect because I’ve been teaching with them for years on domestic machines.

Carolina Moore:
Oh, and that’s a good tip of where to have your ruler.
Now, are there any accessories that people should have with your rulers, things to make it grippy or handles, or any of things like that?

Jane:
It depends. There are times when I use them on my longarm without grip tape, but that’s maybe I’m wanting them to slide along. Especially my appliqué ruler, I wouldn’t want grip tape on that because I’m using that ruler to guide the machine. But when you’re on a domestic or a stationary-head longarm, you definitely want to use grip tape on it to help guide because you’re guiding the fabric around, and that ruler has to have a firm contact with the fabric for sure.

Carolina Moore:
That makes total sense. Now, you mentioned your appliqué ruler again, and that made me think because it was a question early when you first mentioned your appliqué ruler. You’ve got one ruler that works with all different kinds of appliqué, whether it’s a flower or a bird or a basket. What’s the magic of that?

Jane:
There’s a little indent in there that the foot nests in, and the way it works is for me … I’ll try and describe it as best as I can … I have one finger below my foot and one finger behind my foot. The foot’s on the same plane as my fingers, and I can guide that along and help to guide it to where I want it to go. It just helps move the machine along and keep it … Stitch-in-the-ditch work around appliqué can be pretty tedious and slow, and so that just helps guide your foot around all those things.

Carolina Moore:
If I’m understanding this, when I’m machine-quilting on my regular sewing machine, my hands are right there by the needle, so I have this control very close to where the needle is. But when you’re moving to a longarm, the handles are up higher, so the distance from the needle to your hand is further away. Now, this ruler gives you the ability to bring your hand closer in and have that control right at the point of the needle.

Jane:
Yes. Yeah, absolutely.

Carolina Moore:
That makes total sense. I could totally see how that would be helpful, especially for someone who started with their hands so close to the needle and then have moved to them being further away.

Jane:
Right, yeah.

Carolina Moore:
Do you have a preference? If you have a quilt, like your own quilt that you’re going to free-motion quilt, will you always take it to the longarm, or do you sometimes quilt it on your domestic machine?

Jane:
Well, I have a stationary longarm, and I have a movable head longarm, so I go between both. Sometimes for smaller things for myself, I will go back to my stationary longarm and move my … There’s just something about sitting down and moving that fabric around that just I really enjoy, so sometimes I’ll do that, especially if I’m doing, say, a whole cloth where I need to do a lot of fine micro-quilting and everything. I find it easier if I’m sitting down right there at the machine. I have a little bit better control for me for that particular piece. But for the most part, I do go to my moveable-head longarm.

Carolina Moore:
Well, I love that you kept the stationary machine, the stationary-head machine. I had the assumption that you upgraded to a longarm on a frame, but it sounds like you added the longarm on the frame but didn’t replace the machine.

Jane:
Oh, well, I did get rid of it at first, and then when I started teaching at shows, I was teaching at a show, and I was in a stationary longarm room teaching. It was a Handi Quilter-sponsored room, and they approached me after teaching and asked if I would become an educator for them. So, I decided to go ahead and get … Because I had missed my stationary longarms, so once I was an educator for them, I went ahead and got another stationary longarm to have the both and be able to do that. I did the educator thing for them for about five years, and now, I couldn’t commit to travel as much as they would like, so I am now a Handi Quilter ambassador.

Carolina Moore:
That makes sense. It is a lot of travel to travel teach.

Jane:
It is.

Carolina Moore:
Did you see any really fun places when you were travel teaching?

Jane:
I did. I got to go to England and teach at the Quilt Festival over there in Birmingham, and I got to go to Karlsruhe, Germany and teach at a show over there. That was probably the most fun experience because first off, there was definitely a language barrier in Germany, which I guess I wasn’t expecting, but I did have a translator, which was good. And I found that the people taking the longarm classes didn’t really know what a longarm was, but they just wanted to take the class to find out what it was about.
So, we had the best time in there. It was all new people who didn’t have a clue, that they just were amazed. I even took some notions from over here, some different things that I normally passed out to students when I have classes over in the States I took to pass out there. And they were things that they had never even seen before, so it was just a lot of fun.

Carolina Moore:
Well, since this podcast is called I Love Notions, I’m intrigued at what notions you brought with you overseas.

Jane:
One of them was, it was the little bee stencil from Full Line Stencils and the pounce pad, and they were just amazed. They were so excited to get one to take home. Just even some of the marking utensils, like the blue, water-soluble pen and things like that, that were just … They had no clue. They had no idea.

Carolina Moore:
Quilting overseas is a little different than it is here in the U.S. for sure.

Jane:
There was one that it was a father and daughter that decided to take the class just to see what a longarm was, and it was just … I still can remember their faces when they saw it stitching out, and they were just so amazed and so excited.

Carolina Moore:
Yes, And even just the language of calling it a longarm. The first time I was talking to someone who wasn’t in quilting and that I forgot. I was talking about, “Oh, yeah, I’ve got to go drop this quilt top off at my longarmer.” And they were just looking at me like, “So, there’s people with … Their arms are long, like their elbow’s in a weird spot on their … What is a … “

Jane:
Yep. I have a really hard time explaining. People always say, “What do you do for a living?” And then I say, “Oh, I’m a longarmer.” And they’re like, “What is that?” Sometimes it’s hard to explain. I have a picture on my phone, so I can pull that up and just say, “I have this machine, and that’s what I do.”

Carolina Moore:
Yeah, there are times where depending on the situation I’ll say, “Well, I have two really great kids, and I’m raising them,” and forget the whole quilting business because sometimes it’s just … It’s a lot to explain.

Jane:
It is. It really is. And then people are like, “Can you really make a living at that”? Well, yeah, quilting is a big industry.

Carolina Moore:
It definitely is, and many, many people do make their living in the quilting industry, and I think that that’s phenomenal that we get to do that, and pinch myself every day that this is what I get to wake up to and do.

Jane:
Absolutely.

Carolina Moore:
What else do you have coming? Are you working on new ruler designs or new classes or new patterns?

Jane:
No. When I came up with the rulers, I also came up with workbooks, and I have five free-motion quilting workbooks. They’re all designs, but the unique thing is that each page is a different design with arrows showing you how to go. And each page has a clear plastic overlay page that you use a dry-erase marker to get your muscle memory down and to learn the designs that way before you commit them to stitches and fabric.

Carolina Moore:
Smart.

Jane:
Those have been very successful. And my biggest thing in classes hearing from students was that I wish the designs that you taught were printed on fabric, and so I thought about that for quite some time. I did a little bit of research, and I found somebody who would take my designs and print them out on fabric with water-soluble ink. So, I have some free-motion quilting practice panels.
There’s two practice panels. There’s a feather medallion. There’s a feather practice panel, and they all have made YouTube videos to complement those so that if you need the help and seeing somebody stitch it out, it’s out there for you. Now, the people can take those whole cloths, and they’re about fat quarter size, so it’s very manageable for people and that they can go ahead and stitch those out. Once they’re finished stitching with them, they can soak them in water, and those printed lines go right away. And it looks like they did it themselves, so it’s a great way to practice. And they have been highly successful.

Carolina Moore:
Oh, I’m sure. That’s fabulous. Now, are these straight free-motion or also ruler work?

Jane:
There’s definitely some straight lines on there, but mostly free-motion. There’s no reason why you couldn’t throw some ruler work on them also. When I show how to do them, I’m just usually showing the free-motion side of things.
Then, just, I’d say, three years ago, I became an Island Batik ambassador, and so for two years, I did projects every month for them because I love other people’s patterns, but I had some ideas of my own. So, I started branching off and doing some of … I only have two published patterns, and one I’m working on, actually, two I’m working on right now. So, I have branched off into that side of the business too.

Carolina Moore:
Generally, when I speak to people, they start out with, “Okay, I got into a hobby of quilting, and then I really loved it. And at some point, I created my own design.” Then there’s usually some form of either I wanted to publish it or someone said, “Oh, that’s great. Can I buy that pattern?” And that pushes them into pattern. Then, from there, they go into notions. But you went, “I started quilting and really fell in love with the machine-quilting portion of it, then created these tools and then went,” to me, backwards, but not for you. You then added the pattern design bit onto the other side.

Jane:
Yes, and I think what happened is when I did a quilt design, and I came up with it myself, and we all had to share … All the ambassadors had to share each other’s posts … somewhere along the line, a few people said, “Is there a pattern for that? We would really like that.” And I’m like, “Well, why not?” Why not go ahead and write that pattern? So, I did.
Right now, I’ve only really done PDF patterns off of my website, but I’m trying to figure out the other end of it as doing the actual physical patterns and having them out there too.

Carolina Moore:
Yeah, we can absolutely have a conversation about that off the podcast. I love all the parts of quilting, including the business part of quilting because I’m just multifaceted, abnormal in that way.

Jane:
That would be great.

Carolina Moore:
Yeah, I love all the things. Anything else that we want to make sure to add on before we go?

Jane:
I’m trying to think. I do teach. I am contracted to teach longarm classes at the AQS Paducah Show in 2024. That’s in April, so I’ll have those available. I was teaching online during the pandemic. I had a lot of virtual classes going. Then, this past December, I had rotator cuff surgery, and it took me quite a few months to recuperate from that. So, I haven’t really started back up with online teaching, but it is my plan because I have had people ask me recently when I’m going to restart my classes again. That’s been fun too.
I think that’s been the surprise for me is it’s fun teaching through Zoom. I didn’t think that that would go so well, but I’ve done shows virtually, and teaching individual classes virtually has worked well because I can hit people … I would’ve never had all the people in one place, one physical place, as I have had in my classes throughout the country. And I do. That is something else I can add too, is that I do offer lectures, virtual lectures for guilds, and that has gone really well too.

Carolina Moore:
Oh, I bet. That’s fabulous. I’ll make sure to have links to all those in the show notes, including where people can sign up for your class at Paducah next year.

Jane:
Perfect.

Carolina Moore:
I’m sure people want to check that out as well. Speaking of which, where can people find you online?

Jane:
Online, I’m at stitchbystitchcustomquilting.com.

Carolina Moore:
Then, are you on social media, Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, YouTube, any of the wild and crazy places that we hang out on the interwebs?

Jane:
I haven’t branched out to TikTok yet, but I am on Facebook. I am under my name, Jane Hauprich, and then Stitch by Stitch. Custom Quilting is my business page. Instagram, I’m on there as Jane Stitch by Stitch. I am on YouTube. I do have a YouTube channel that I try and offer as much as I can get on there as far as free-motion tutorials. Like I said, I just want everybody to love free-motion like I do, and so I try and do … I haven’t done any lately, really since my surgery, but I have a whole list of ones I want to get to in the future.

Carolina Moore:
Well, I will make sure to add those links in the show notes as well so people can also subscribe to your YouTube channel and get those tutorials as they come out.

Jane:
Thank you.

Carolina Moore:
But Jane, thank you so much for hanging out with me today. This was really fun.

Jane:
Thank you. Thanks for having me.

Carolina Moore:
Friends, that’s our episode for today. I hope you loved it as much as I loved having this conversation. Remember that you can find all the details that we talked about in the show notes, and those are all at ilovenotions.com. Make sure to leave this podcast a review in your favorite podcasting app. Leaving it a review will help the podcast algorithm show this podcast to other people who love notions just as much as we do.
Friends, that’s all I have for you today, but I will see you right here real soon. Bye for now.

The post Jane Hauprich – Stitch by Stitch Custom Quilting appeared first on i love notions.

Those who have been in the modern quilting world a while may be familiar with Latifah’s name because she was a co-founder of both the Los Angeles Modern Quilt Guild and the worldwide Modern Quilt Guild, Latifah currently teaches workshops to guilds around the country.

Show Notes:

Find Latifah at Latifah Saafir Studios.com
Check out Latifah’s Facebook Page
Join Latifah’s Sewing with Latifah Facebook Group
Find Latifah on Instagram
Subscribe to the Latifah Saafir YouTube Channel

Listen to the episode:

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Read the transcript of my interview with Latifah Saafir:

Carolina Moore:
I love notions and I’m guessing that you do, too. Hey there, friend. It’s Carolina Moore, your favorite sewing and quilting YouTuber, and now podcaster here with another episode.
So today’s guest is someone who needs absolutely no introduction, but I’m going to try anyway. She is the inventor of both The Clammy & The HuRTy, and I don’t even know if I’m pronouncing that right, but I’m sure you’ll let me know. Please welcome Latifah Saafir.

Latifah Saafir:
Hi. Thank you so much for having me on today.

Carolina Moore:
I’m so excited to talk to you about… You have just some really creative notions, but before we jump into that, let’s start with your quilty origin story. What got you into quilting?

Latifah Saafir:
Yeah, so I was one of those that had been sewing my whole life. My mom taught me how to sew when I was six or seven. I got really interested when I was probably about 11 or 12. I have an older sister who’s a year older than me. We kind of did everything together during those years and we wanted to sew clothes, garments. And so my mom, who sort of hated sewing but was smart enough to teach us the basics, gave us the machine and just let us have at it. So pretty much self-thought, and we wade it through everything from…
And back then, it was mainly the big four pattern company, so Simplicity, McCall’s, Vogue, and Butterick. And we waded through every single kind of pattern and learned how to mix and match and do all of that pre-internet days, of course. And so that’s how I learned how to sew. And I became competent enough where I could sew anything from… Or I did sew anything from my suit that I interviewed in when I graduated college, when I graduated engineering school, to making my mom’s renewal vows, wedding dress when they did their 30th renewal vows.

Carolina Moore:
That’s incredible.

Latifah Saafir:
So I did all that before I even quilted, but I left quilts ever since I was about 15. For some reason, even though I was pretty fearless in garment sewing, I was really hesitant in quilting and I didn’t start quilting until 2009. I had been kind of gotten away from crafting and creating and sewing. I sew a quilt at an event and I just realized I need to be doing this and I kind of dive in head first to things. So that year, I started and finished my first quilt. And actually, I had to finish my first two quilts and so that I would have something to show at the first Los Angeles Modern Quilt Guild meeting, which I also co-founded that year as well. And it’s been all quilting all the time ever since.

Carolina Moore:
Hold on. So your first quilt, you showed at the first LA Modern Quilt Guild meeting.

Latifah Saafir:
Yes. I mean, to be fair, I didn’t have to learn how to sew to quilt, so I just had to learn a few quilty like putting a binding on or I had the skills behind me, so I didn’t have to learn to sew to quilt.

Carolina Moore:
No, no.

Latifah Saafir:
That’s absolutely correct.

Carolina Moore:
So you knew that you love quilting so much that you helped found an organization before you made… You didn’t have this stack of quilts and then said, “Oh, I think there should be a modern quilt guild.” You said, “I think quilting is amazing. There should be a modern quilt guild,” and “Oh, I’m going to work on this quilt at the same time.” That’s incredible.

Latifah Saafir:
For better or worse, I do dive in head first, so it’s okay.

Carolina Moore:
Oh, I’m going to say very sarcastically. I know nothing about that.

Latifah Saafir:
You don’t. Yeah.

Carolina Moore:
That’s awesome.

Latifah Saafir:
Yeah, and it’s kind of been all quilting all the time ever since. So it’s been a really fun, amazing journey and I never would’ve imagined I would be where I am now from when I started.

Carolina Moore:
That’s incredible. So your first quilt pattern was that first quilt?

Latifah Saafir:
No, my very first quilt I made was off of a free pattern downloaded off of the Purl Soho site. And my second quilt pattern was I basically looked at one of the older Elizabeth Hartman patterns and made it kind of without referencing her pattern. And then after that, I pretty much have only sew my creations ever since. So probably starting with my third quilt pattern was the first one, I was like, “Okay, let me figure this out on my own and create my own design.”

Carolina Moore:
So you fell right into pattern design?

Latifah Saafir:
Back then, it wasn’t really pattern design. It was designing for myself. So it was just quilt design. I wasn’t really writing the pattern for it necessarily. My very first quilt pattern was Glam Clam, which we talked about the clammy a little bit, but Glam Clam was my first quilt pattern, and I did it because everyone was screaming and hollering that they wanted to make one, too. And that was probably… Let me see what year that was, because it was a free download on the original crafty back in the day. And I wanted to make a clamshell quilt for some reason.
I’ve always been attracted to curves and what people think of as more difficult quilting techniques. Clamshell are originally… Antique clamshell quilts, you’ll see they’re small. They’re two and three inches, four inches, not much bigger than that, but I don’t particularly love to hand sew or do anything in my hand for better or worse. And so I’m like, “Okay, I’m going to figure out how to do this by machines. I’m going to blow it up. And so I drafted these paper templates. They had tabs on it, which sort of hearkens back to my garment sewing days where you [inaudible] for alignment marks. And the pattern was ridiculously long. It was stupid long. And I started developing this technique for sewing the way that I sew curves now. And that’s kind of what started me on my whole journey. That was before I thought I would do this as a career. It was a free pattern download, but it started my whole journey and I have a whole product line based off of that very first quilt design right now.

Carolina Moore:
I don’t know if you know this, so kind of an aside, I was a judge at the San Diego County Fair this last year, this summer, and the best of show quilt was a Glam Clam.

Latifah Saafir:
I know, I saw that. It’s so fun because I mean, that’s amazing. And there’s been a lot of glam clams entered into a lot of shows and they’ve won a few ribbons but not missed a show. So that was exciting. But it’s really fun because it literally started off as a quilt I wanted to make for me, and I passionately dove into it to figure it out for myself. And now to see literally probably thousands of glam clams made to the point where glam clam is now synonymous with clamshell quilts for better or worse, because I didn’t really understand that I should trademark a name for a pattern at that time, but that’s a whole nother story. A lot of people use it as a substitution for the word clamshell quilts. They call them Glam Clam quilts down, and that’s beyond what my pattern is. So it’s kind of fun. It’s a lot of fun.

Carolina Moore:
So move over Kleenex tissues and Xerox copies. We have Glam Clam clamshell quilts.

Latifah Saafir:
We do. We do.

Carolina Moore:
So you wrote the pattern well before you had a template then?

Latifah Saafir:
I did because I literally wanted to just help people make the quilt that I was making and people loved making the pattern. Actually, that also started my career as a quilt teacher as well. And I taught it a ton of times to a lot of guilds. And my only complaint was we love the pattern. We love the quilt. We hate paper templates. Can we do an acrylic template? And just knowing the price of acrylic, I didn’t want to produce a single use template, so I didn’t want to produce one template would make one quilt, and that’s it.
A lot of people ask me about my process for designing my tools. I literally throw it in the back of my head and it bubbles up at some point. I have an engineering background. My mind thinks it’s a very problem solving oriented, and it sort of bubbles up on how it all works out. And I worked through the problem all in my head before it’s designed. So the clammy came out in my brain, but I was working, I didn’t really have money to produce it, and I launched a Kickstarter to launch the first series of clammy on my first few printed patterns. And so it’s been a really, really fun journey.

Carolina Moore:
That’s right. I remember the Kickstarter that you did to launch it.

Latifah Saafir:
It was so exciting. Yes.

Carolina Moore:
Was that nervous knowing, “Okay, I’m going to launch this thing and it may or may not be successful”?

Latifah Saafir:
It was so crazy, because in my brain, it’s one thing for people to say, “I love you.” And then there’s another thing for them to say, “I love you. Here’s money.”

Carolina Moore:
Yes, for sure.

Latifah Saafir:
And then I also was doing something I had never done before, so I did as much work as I could before I launched the Kickstarter and launched it. But that last 20% of the work was the hardest because they were things I had never done before. I’ve never produced templates. I’ve never actually had printed patterns up until that point. And so it was definitely a huge learning curve. I learned to underpromise and overperform. It’s a big lesson I learned out of that because for everyone’s Kickstarter, everything’s always late because you think, “Oh, I can get this done in this period of time. And then it’s harder and longer.” But I wanted to raise, I think, 10 or $12,000.” And I just about doubled that. And there were lots of tears involved then as well.

Carolina Moore:
I remember it was wildly successful. I remember watching that and going, “Wow, this is so incredible.” And the quilted community, they showed up not just by saying, “We love what you do, but we love what you do and we want to buy into what you do literally.”

Latifah Saafir:
Yeah, they showed up huge, huge, huge. That’s how I got started. That’s how my first, and they’ve evolved. The basis of the clammy has stayed the same, but I’ve learned a lot. And we’re now in version four maybe, but the very first earliest version still works. It’s just had little improvements and tweaks over time, and I learned a lot about developing tools and templates.

Carolina Moore:
And you also offer in different sizes now as well, right?

Latifah Saafir:
So when the Kickstarter launched, I think I was just trying to produce the 12 inch and the 8 inch. And then because it was so well funded, I added the six inch onto it then. And since then, I’ve added the 10 inch, and I also have been coming out really soon here I have the 10 square clammy, which is actually a 9 inch, but if it’s on the 10 squares or your layer cakes.

Carolina Moore:
The 10-inch pre-cuts? Perfect.

Latifah Saafir:
Yes.

Carolina Moore:
Oh, that’s so smart.

Latifah Saafir:
Yes, yes, yes. And then, recently, I did the crazy ridiculous 16 and 24 inch, the Giant Clammy’s.

Carolina Moore:
I sew those and I’m kicking myself for not getting one.

Latifah Saafir:
Oh my God. So it’s one of those things, especially as designers and you’re a designer, we think, “Oh my God, wouldn’t it be amazing if we had X, Y, and Z?” But then in a lot of ways it’s sort of impractical because the 24 inch clammy is ridiculous, but it’s also completely awesome, but it’s expensive to make. It’s expensive to purchase, but it makes the most amazing quilts. And so I knew it wasn’t a product I wanted to carry forever, so I decided to do it as a direct to consumer limited edition if you want to take advantage of it.
Now, I may not ever carry it because it’s ridiculous to ship all of the things, but it was so worth it. And I just did what we call the Giant Clammy experience, and we had a couple of hundred people join in and they got the 16 and 24 inch. And I did add-on cards to the existing clammy patterns, and there’s a few left on my website but not many. And I may restock them in the future, but it’s not going to be an ongoing product that I continue to provide, but they’re pretty awesome.

Carolina Moore:
I’d heard that they were sold out and I didn’t go and check myself, which lesson learned, I need to go check the rumors myself so I know what I’m doing right after we finish the podcast.

Latifah Saafir:
I did sell out of my original stock, but there was a lot of people who still wanted them. So I did a special extra order at the end when I did the fixed sale. And so I did add on a few. So the 16 inches, there’s just a handful left and there’s maybe, I don’t know, 25 or something of the 24 inches. There’s not many left at all. But anyway, they’re fun. They’re super, super fun. And the quilts that you get out of them, the most fun you could do is not just to cut the shape out, but to piece something else and then cut that piece. So I did a 24-inch log cabin and then cut this 24-inch circle out of it, then piece those together, and it’s the log cabin quilt, but just that little bit of extra makes it so amazing and so special.

Carolina Moore:
That’s so fun.

Latifah Saafir:
Yeah, I love it.

Carolina Moore:
Okay, so you had the clammy wildly successful. People love the patterns. This has launched your teaching career and you’re traveling around teaching people how to make clamshell quilts, glam clam quilts. And then it’s so funny, so I find a lot of notion designers, once they have one thing that they do, for example, you do curves really well with this clammy, they stay in that vein, but you did a hard left, which I love, and your next notion was actually a half rectangle triangle ruler.

Latifah Saafir:
Absolutely. So in some ways, it’s a heart left, and I think that’s because people associate you with one product line or one technique or whatever. But half rectangle triangles and I have a pretty long history. So early on in the Modern Quilt Guild years, we did a… Oh, I forget what it was called, but it was an event we did where we basically blogged about making different shapes. And I was really intrigued at this time, and this is, I don’t know, more than 10 years ago, but I was really intrigued, at that time, about half rectangle triangles.
And so one of the earliest tutorials for creating half rectangle triangles without a tool, I actually created and posted online. And I make a lot of assumptions because of how my brain works. And I didn’t include really specific directions for squaring it up. And people were really upset because they said it didn’t work. So I adjusted it and reposted it. And it’s hilarious because if you look at the tutorials online now, most of them are pretty much duplicates of my technique that I developed for creating them. So I have a longer history than I think people imagine with half rectangle triangles. But they’re making them without a tool is just really a pain. It’s not fun at all.

Carolina Moore:
Because that seam allowance with a half square triangle, your diagonal seam line matches right up with the diagonal on your square. But once you’re doing half rectangle triangle, that diagonal is at a different angle. So it doesn’t line up with those marks you’re used to.

Latifah Saafir:
Exactly. And your same doesn’t go through the corners and you have to cut sort of the left facing and right facing half rectangle triangles with the angles and opposite directions. You have to cut them differently in order to sew them and have them go on the right way. So it’s a strange shape to cut, but it’s a really, really fun shape to use as well. So once again, I also threw it in the back of my head and tried to figure out how can we create a tool that makes… We pre-cut the triangles and then it’s also a tool to square them up as well. And we came up with HuRTy.
I’m fine with stepping out of the box on how things are done. So it’s really a little bit awkward when you first start to use it because we use both sides of the ruler. We flip it top to bottom in order to use it, but it works really, really well. And the beauty of the HuRTy is that you don’t have to worry about precision until you’re squaring it up. So you don’t have to be precise with pre-cutting triangles. You don’t have to be precise even with your sewing, because I give you a whole quarter inch all the way around to square it up, and that’s where the precision comes in and it makes it so much easier so.

Carolina Moore:
You’re speaking my love language. My favorite seam allowance is the quarter inch-ish.

Latifah Saafir:
Yes, yes, absolutely. Yeah. As long as it’s going to stay together, you’re going to be fine. Exactly.

Carolina Moore:
I love that you do use both sides of the ruler, because the other solution would be to have a two template set. And then if you lose one, which all of us have very tidy sewing rooms and would never, ever lose anything in these sewing rooms at all, none of us own four of the same notion because we need it so often and we can’t find the other three. So putting all the parts on one ruler means that if I have it, I can do the whole thing.

Latifah Saafir:
Exactly, exactly. Yeah. So it’s fun. It’s the HuRTy 1. It does the most popular ratio, which is one to two, which is mean that one side is twice as big as the other, and it cuts everything from a one to two inch, one by two inch, I mean, half rectangle triangle, which is really tiny and super cute all the way up to 6 by 12. And it also does a weird ratio of one to six, which has these really fun long and skinny half rectangle triangles as well. So coming soon, I’m submitting artwork to my two developers right now is the HuRTy 2 and HuRTy 3, which will cover lots of other ratios. So two to three, three to four. There’s four total other ratios that’ll be covered, which are really, it’s fun. Now, it gives us all different dimensions for our half rectangle triangles. And we have a lot of fun with writing patterns for that, or just playing with them and creating.

Carolina Moore:
That is so awesome. I’m so excited for that. Do you know about when those will launch? You have an idea?

Latifah Saafir:
I’m thinking there’ll be sometime in the fall. Sometime in the fall.

Carolina Moore:
Okay. So later this year we’ll get to see those. That’s exciting.

Latifah Saafir:
Yeah, I’m super excited about it. Yeah.

Carolina Moore:
Now you launched a bunch of patterns at the same time that you launched the HuRTy as well, right?

Latifah Saafir:
I did. So a lot of people who followed my story online, they’ve heard about my grandfather. He passed about a year ago, but I was able to help him to make it to 101, well, a day shy of 101, but he took up a lot of time and space over the past 10 years. And I’m forever grateful that I have owned my own business and can kind of work around his care and my schedule at home. But one of the things I realized just after he passed was that I’ve been like… My business was sort of in the background or second. It wasn’t first for sure. So when it came time to release the HuRTy, I’m like, “How can I do this where my customers are fully supported when the product goes out?”
So there’s a dedicated webpage for the HuRTy. It has full video support. There’s tons of videos. If you use your little brochure that comes in the package that has the basic instructions on it, you can download that there. There’s even a fun playlist. And so I released the HuRTy in three patterns at the time. And because I was doing all the things, I also had a guest pattern designer as well, Caroline Hatley, from Australia. So that was really fun to have as well. And for the first time I really had a product release that I felt was done, and it was very thorough. And at the end, I didn’t feel like, “Oh, I have to go back and do this video, or I have to go back.” So it’s all there. And it’s really nice because on the HuRTy and also on all of the patterns, there’s a QR code where you can just scan it and it goes straight to that page, and we’re all things HuRTy on the one page.
So it’s all there. It’s really easy. I want you to be able to pick up your tool, if you need help, video assistance or whatever, scan it, and then go straight directly to that page. So it’s all there. But there’s three patterns. The other side, Mood Forever and Paperdrop. And Paperdrop is the one at Caroline Design, which is really brilliant. And then the easiest is probably the other site because it’s 6 by 12 half rectangle triangles and it’s only one angle. So it’s kind of easy to learn just at one angle, one size. It’s really easy to square it up, but the other one’s equally as fun as well.

Carolina Moore:
Yeah, they’re great patterns. I saw this launch and I was like, “Oh, I mean, it was just so well done. And yes, everything was all right there.” And also, I did follow some of your Chronicles of Granddad over on Facebook and just the generational, I mean, joy of the difference between where he was at and where you were at.

Latifah Saafir:
Yeah, it was a lot. And I realized that even more after the fact, but I wouldn’t give it up for anything in the world. It was hard. But it’s one of those priceless gifts that we could pass on to our families that having this business actually allowed me to be able to do. So thank all of you for supporting me through all of that. But yeah, Chronicles of Granddad are a fun series of stories that I told, and a lot of times to capture the fun moments, but also the frustrating ones as well, but there’s lots of stories about granddad putting ketchup on everything and all kind of ridiculous things. Me being accused of stealing all his furniture in his bedroom and stuff like that, but it’s life and it’s fun.

Carolina Moore:
I’m assuming you didn’t actually steal the furniture in his bedroom?

Latifah Saafir:
I did not. Most hilarious thing is, to this day, I go to quilt shows and people will ask me about grandpa before they ask me about myself. I loved it. It was really sweet. I loved it.

Carolina Moore:
So you’ve got the HuRTy. How did you name it, by the way?

Latifah Saafir:
I always tell people I amuse myself with these things. So I wanted to do something with the HRT for half rectangle triangles. The funny thing is when you look up HRT online, the first thing that comes up is hormone replacement therapy and not half rectangle triangles. People call half rectangle triangles different things. So I tried to think of what words we could fill in with maybe vowels and consonants to make. So it was like heart, hurt. Half rectangle triangles are really a pain to make. And so it was like, “I like to do a play on words.” So it was the same naming convention as The Clammy. So the HuRTy with the Y at the end, and then it’s like no fuss, no pain, the HuRTy. It’s really silly. But my very next tool release that I’m working on developing right now, the name is even more hilarious. It’s called The Wedgie, so it’s more hilarious.

Carolina Moore:
That’s the front door. I love it.

Latifah Saafir:
[inaudible] in template. That’s kind of fun.

Carolina Moore:
All right, so I’ve never been so excited about a wedgie before, but when do we get to find out about the… When is The Wedgie?

Latifah Saafir:
I probably shouldn’t even talk about it this early because people are going to start asking me about it, but it’ll be early next year. It’ll be early next year.

Carolina Moore:
Okay.

Latifah Saafir:
[Inaudible].

Carolina Moore:
I’m so glad that you shared that. If you want, I can edit it out, but I really don’t want to.

Latifah Saafir:
No, it’s totally fine. It’s totally fine.

Carolina Moore:
That’s awesome. And now I’m like, “I wonder what else ends with why that you’re going to come out with. That’s going to be awesome.”

Latifah Saafir:
Oh no, I think Wedgie is going to be hard to beat though.

Carolina Moore:
Oh, I’m in tears. It’s so good.

Latifah Saafir:
Yeah, it’s fun. I mean, the reality is, as designers, 90% of our time is spent sitting in front of our computers working.

Carolina Moore:
By ourselves.

Latifah Saafir:
By ourselves. And so I have to amuse myself somehow. And pattern is one of the ways I do that.

Carolina Moore:
That’s so fun. Sorry, you’ve put… I’m at a total pause. I’m so thrilled. It’s hilarious.

Latifah Saafir:
It’s hilarious. It is.

Carolina Moore:
Okay, so you’re working on patterns then for The Wedgie?

Latifah Saafir:
I am. So the fun thing about all of the tools, so the clammy is designed, of course, not just to make a clamshell, but basically all curve shapes that are based on a circle. So circles, quarter circles, orange peels, et cetera, et cetera. So I literally could build a whole business off of one tool. So I am constantly trying to release patterns for all of the tools as I develop more tools as well. And so my next patterns are more clammy-based patterns, but then we’re working on, for the HuRTy 2 and 3 release. I’m working on releasing two or three patterns that go along with that release as well. And then, of course, when The Wedgie does come out early next year, then we’ll have wedgie patterns as well.

Carolina Moore:
Sorry, wedgie patterns. My brain is [inaudible]. I’m just going to giggle like a 12-year-old the whole time. This is going to be the best.

Latifah Saafir:
Oh my goodness. It’s hilarious. It’s funny because when you do things like that, then some people love it and some people don’t. So I’ve had actual quilt pattern names that I’ve made, I’ve gotten emails about, and people are like, “I just don’t like the name of this quilt.” It’s like, “I’m sorry. What can you do? I have to have fun somehow.”

Carolina Moore:
So one thing that I’ve learned along this process, and I don’t know if you’ve had a similar experience, but especially with YouTube commenters, YouTube commenters tend to be the most honest people out there in terms of just giving you their unvarnished opinion. This is as fact generally, it’s like, “This is my opinion as fact.” But they’re not always kind about… Generally, in the quilting community, 98% of quilters are the most kind, generous, loving people that you’ll meet. And then there’s a two percent that’ll just tell you exactly how it is. But I say that to say that the opposite of love isn’t hate and hate really isn’t the opposite of love. When someone’s coming at me with anger, they’re still coming at me with passion. Love is passion and hate is passion. So even when they’re coming at me with anger, that feels like hateful. It’s passionate. And so we have that common ground of we’re both passionate about this thing called quilting. And so we can come at this together side by side with common passion, just a different twist on our common passion.

Latifah Saafir:
The reality is we have to deal with this in the classroom and that type of thing as well, is that when people have that level of passion about something as sort of benign as a quilt name, then it’s usually something else going on in their lives or something anyway. So we all have to learn how to not take it personal. So it wasn’t, but I had a pattern called Pickled Beets, and I had someone actually take the time to write me an email about it, how they hated the name. And I always think about it, and I just laugh. I mean, I can’t get upset at that at all. It’s like, “Thanks for sharing.”

Carolina Moore:
I was mentally going through the names of your patterns and trying to think which one could have been offensive. Pickled beets were offensive?

Latifah Saafir:
I guess, pickled beets are, I don’t know, maybe they had a bad experience as a child eating pickled beets. I have no idea.

Carolina Moore:
I mean, to this day I’ll pick out the lima beans and things, but I wouldn’t be mad at a pattern called Lima Beans.

Latifah Saafir:
It’s hilarious. It’s fun. It’s all good. It’s all good.

Carolina Moore:
Okay, so we’ve got the HuRTy, because the HuRTy just came out, it feels like this year, but I think it was last year.

Latifah Saafir:
It was the end of last year. It was like October, November of last year. So it’s almost been out a year now.

Carolina Moore:
And then we have The Wedgie coming out next year with new patterns. I’m afraid to ask if there’s anything else. You can’t have anything else. That’s what you have going on because that’s a lot.

Latifah Saafir:
It’s a lot. Well, I always have other ideas. So I have one or two other tools that are in the background stewing and sort of working their way through the actual dynamics of the design itself. But yeah, I’m focusing on getting the HuRTy fully out, which means 2 and 3 after that, that’s that’ll be done and then The Wedgie, and I’m not sure if I’ll do a Wedgie 1 or just one wedgie or Wedgie 1 and 2. So just dealing with the different wedge angles. And it’s going to be a wedge template as well as a dressed in template. So I’m kind of excited about that as well. So it’s fun. It’s a lot of fun. It keeps me busy and my brain busy, and I have way too many ideas to actually put out in the world. So I have to be really specific about how I approach this.
And I don’t usually do single use templates. I usually try to design a tool that is multi-use, but I do have two smaller tools that are coming out, acrylic templates coming out later on this year that are very pattern specific. So my very first printed pattern was molehills and Jennifer Sampou with her recent SKY and Chalk & Charcoal release actually featured molehills on her cover. And this pattern was written in 2013, and it has paper templates. The shape is based on an oval. And I finally figured out how to do for the five different arcs that go inside of this molehill shape, I finally figured out how to do it in one template piece. I’m so excited.

Carolina Moore:
What?

Latifah Saafir:
Yeah. Which just really, I was so excited to be able to figure it out, because otherwise, it’s ridiculously expensive. So I figured that out. And it’s going to be a limited edition. So I’m releasing a molehill template that’s just for the molehills quilt, but it makes it so much easier to use. And then I have a quilt called Glare that’s coming out. It just makes it really easier to also have this one template that goes with the glare quilt as well. But I figured out how to make that template a multi-use template. So it’s not as versatile as like a clammy or HuRTy or something like that, but I have dozen quilts that we can use with the glare template as well. So I’m always coming up with something, but that’s what keeps my brain happy. That’s what I love about quilting is the design part and also the teaching part.
So to design not only a useful tool or technique, but to figure out how to put it in a way that’s actually really easy and useful to filters as well. So that’s my love. And I tell people, I’m like, “I don’t love sewing.” And a lot of people don’t understand that. For me, sewing is a means to an end, and I’m really jealous of people that enjoy the process of sitting at their sewing machine. But I love designing and I love figuring out the puzzle. And thankfully, a lot of people get to benefit from it from my products that I’ve developed, so it makes us all happy.

Carolina Moore:
Yes. A lot of us get to benefit from it. I think that’s the power of a good notion is that it takes a process that maybe we could do it before, but it makes it easier. It makes it more accessible and gives us a better chance of success at the end of the process.

Latifah Saafir:
Exactly.

Carolina Moore:
And I love notions that are designed by people who understand the quilting process, I mean, especially quilters. And even if you don’t love sewing, you definitely are a quilter. Right?

Latifah Saafir:
Yes, you’re right.

Carolina Moore:
So you understand the whole creation process and the pain points of quilting and how to attack those.

Latifah Saafir:
Oh, for sure. I mean, I’m definitely a quilter. I do a lot of my quilts from the beginning to the end. It’s only been the last few years that I’ve started sending up some of them out to long goers, so just because I have too much on my plate. If it’s a quilt that means something to me, I like to own the whole process of the quilt. And it’s not that when I’m in the middle of… I don’t enjoy the actual rote process of sewing, but I love to birth my quilt. So I like to take it from design all the way into sewing those last few stitches of putting the binding on.

Carolina Moore:
Sure.

Latifah Saafir:
And I am pretty competent at sewing, and I sew really fast, but with a fair bit of precision. But the biggest part is that I have to sew all of my quilts because I have to make all the mistakes that all of my customers are going to make so that I can help them navigate and so that I could teach better in the classroom. And I always tell them, “I made all the mistakes for you, so just listen to me. You’ve done it all.”

Carolina Moore:
The best teacher who has made all the mistakes said, “Oh, don’t cut these all ahead of time, because half of these triangles are left-leaning triangles and half of them are right-leaning triangles. And you can’t do that but you can with half rectangle triangles.”

Latifah Saafir:
Exactly, exactly. Yeah.

Carolina Moore:
That’s so smart.

Latifah Saafir:
Yeah, it’s fun.

Carolina Moore:
Well, this has been really fun to chat with you. Is there anything else that you want to share before we finish up?

Latifah Saafir:
No, not that I can think of. Not at all, but I do want to thank you for having me on. It’s been really fun.

Carolina Moore:
Absolutely. Okay, so where can people find you online to be able to connect with you?

Latifah Saafir:
So pretty much everywhere online. I am Latifah Saafir Studios, all one word, so that’s my website, latifahsaafirstudios.com, on Facebook, on Instagram as well. I do have a Facebook group that’s Sewing with Latifah. That’s it, everywhere online.

Carolina Moore:
Okay. I’ll make sure to link all those spots in the show notes as well as where people can find that Giant Clammy if there’s any left.

Latifah Saafir:
Oh, yes. And the other thing I would like to encourage people to do as well is in order for our industry to really… I don’t know about all of your listeners, but I’m a touch and feel person, so I still love to support my local quilt shop a lot. So if you do have favorite notions, whether they’re mine or someone else’s, you don’t see them in your LQS, your local quilt shops, then request them.

Carolina Moore:
Yes.

Latifah Saafir:
Then request them. And they may not necessarily bring them in, but at least if they keep hearing the names of these products that we love and support your local quilt shops as well. And so we can all keep quilting and having fun with this.

Carolina Moore:
And a lot of times, quilt shops can special order an item and they can order one or two of them. They don’t have to order 40 of an item in to bring it in.

Latifah Saafir:
If some designers, if they don’t order from the distributor, some designers do low order quantities as well. Absolutely.

Carolina Moore:
So asking your local quilt shop if you don’t see it on the shelf, if they’d be willing to order it. That way, you can support your local quilt shop as well as supporting the designer all at the same time. I agree. Local quilt shops are national treasure and we need to protect them.

Latifah Saafir:
Absolutely.

Carolina Moore:
Well, thanks so much for your time. Everything will be in the show notes for anyone who wants to go find any of those links and we’ll see you later.

Latifah Saafir:
All right. Thank you so much, Carolina.

Carolina Moore:
Friends, that’s our episode for today. I hope you loved it as much as I loved having this conversation. Remember that you can find all the details that we talked about in the show notes, and those are all at ilovenotions.com. And make sure to leave this podcast a review in your favorite podcasting app. Leaving it a review will help the podcast algorithm show this podcast to other people who love notions just as much as we do. Friends, that’s all I have for you today, but I will see you right here real soon. Bye for now.

The post Latifah Saafir appeared first on i love notions.

Seams Like a Dream Quilt Designs, started in 2003 as a collaboration between Kate Colleran and Elizabeth Balderrama. Kate did the quilt pattern designs and Elizabeth did consultations, pattern testing and was the shipping maven. They designed quilts for patterns, for quilt magazines, for fabric companies and for their book, Smash Your Precut Stash, with C&T Publishing.

When Elizabeth retired in 2015, Kate changed the name of the quilt pattern line to match the official name of the business, Kate Colleran Designs, LLC.

Kate has also designed several specialty templates… which we talk about in this interview.

Show Notes:

Check out the Kate Colleran Designs website.
Find the Braid Template here.
Find the Mini Braid Template here.
Find the Drunkard’s Path Template here.

Listen to the Episode:

Follow these links to popular podcast players:

Listen and subscribe here on Apple Podcasts
Listen and subscribe here on Spotify
Listen and Subscribe here on Google Podcasts

Transcript with Kate Colleran:

Carolina Moore:
I love notions and I’m guessing that you do too. Hey there, friend. It’s Carolina Moore, your favorite sewing and quilting YouTuber and now podcaster here with another episode. So I’m sitting here with Kate and we’re outside the H&H Show and you have a ruler.

Kate:
I do.

Carolina Moore:
Okay, so let’s actually start at the beginning. You’re a quilter. Where did this all start?

Kate:
Well, if we want to really talk about where I started quilting, I started quilting when I was a teenager. So I had a cousin who’s older than me, she’s married and she’s having a baby. So I thought, “Oh, a baby needs a quilt,” but nobody in my family quilted. So I went to the local dry good store. I bought flannel because I thought, “Oh, it’s a baby. You need something soft.” So then I went home and I took a cereal box and I drew a square and I cut it out with scissors. And then I laid it on my flannel, traced it with pencil and then cut out the squares.

Carolina Moore:
And then did that a hundred times?

Kate:
Oh, yes. And then because I had taken home ec, I sewed them all together with a 5/8-inch seam.

Carolina Moore:
Oh, perfect.

Kate:
Right, so because who knew that there was such a thing as a quarter-inch seam?

Carolina Moore:
Not in garment sewing.

Kate:
No, and I didn’t know. So anyway, and then when I was all done, I was like, “Now what do you do with it?” So I put some batting with it, I sewed all the way around the edges, I turned it and I tied it with Girl Scout, floss from a Girl Scout project.

Carolina Moore:
That’s amazing. My very first ever quilt was also tied.

Kate:
Was it really?

Carolina Moore:
Yes, yes, yes.

Kate:
Yeah, because I didn’t know what else to do.

Carolina Moore:
But that’s what we actually did in those days. That was really, really normal for quilting.

Kate:
Right, right. So it wasn’t unusual and it was a quick and easy way to do it. And it was a baby quilt, so it was just squares sewn together. So it was fun. That was my very first quilt.

Carolina Moore:
Yay, and you caught the bug.

Kate:
I caught the bug. So I went to college and I tried to convince my college roommate that we needed matching quilts on our bed.

Carolina Moore:
Oh, that’s fun. Did it work?

Kate:
Sort of. Hers never got finished until after she graduated college, but it was there at the end of her bed for a while, but it was unfinished. And then I made a quilt when I got married. That one, I put a sheet on the back because I didn’t know any better again.

Carolina Moore:
Well, but there’s probably still a lot of people who use sheets. They’re inexpensive.

Kate:
Right.

Carolina Moore:
You don’t have to put a seam on them. The thread count isn’t ideal for quilting and …

Kate:
Right.

Carolina Moore:
… it can cause some problems there, but …

Kate:
But it works.

Carolina Moore:
… it works. And if that’s what you have in your budget, then that’s what you have in your budget.

Kate:
Right. Because you’re newly married, you’re young, you’re just starting working, so it just made sense. And I was thinking of hand quilting it and then I think I did about half of a square and said, “Oh, this isn’t happening,” when I tied it.

Carolina Moore:
So it has a half of square tied on there and the rest of it is just all tied.

Kate:
Oh, yeah. And to be honest, that quilt is now … Unfortunately, they’re long gone because I had kids and I had dogs and I had whatever and-

Carolina Moore:
Because quilts are made to be used and that one was well-loved.

Kate:
It was well-loved. It was well-loved. So I was self-taught for a very long time. And then I went to work. I was a nurse for 30 years, so I went to work at a visiting nurse agency and a whole bunch of women quilted. Yeah, so that was fun. So they directed me to my very first quilt class at a local shop that I knew nothing about.

Carolina Moore:
And you learned about a quarter-inch seam.

Kate:
I learned about a quarter-inch seam. I did. And these ladies were very big into applique, but they would like-

Carolina Moore:
Was this hand applique, needle turn applique?

Kate:
Hand applique.

Carolina Moore:
Hand, then needle turn applique?

Kate:
Uh-huh. Yes, so I got involved with them, and we decided to form a little group and we were making quilts for each other. And so we did this thing where each month it was a different person’s turn. And when it was your turn, you handed everybody blocks to make for you.

Carolina Moore:
Oh, lovely.

Kate:
Yes, and we’d bring the blocks back all pieced, appliqued, quilted.

Carolina Moore:
Oh, wow.

Kate:
And then we’d sew together during the meeting and then you’d get the next block to make the next month.

Carolina Moore:
That’s amazing, so-

Kate:
Isn’t it?

Carolina Moore:
Basically, every month, you were making a quilt, but as a group.

Kate:
As a group.

Carolina Moore:
And then one of the months was yours.

Kate:
Right, exactly.

Carolina Moore:
Yeah, that’s fabulous. I love that.

Kate:
And I still have that quilt. It was on my bed for a long, long time. And I still have it, but it’s starting to fall apart because it’s been a while.

Carolina Moore:
Sure.

Kate:
But what’s really fun is, on the back of everybody’s block, I had given them a little heart to applique and they signed their name. So I can turn the quilt over and see all the names of the ladies who worked on it, some of which of course are no longer with us.

Carolina Moore:
Oh, that’s just my heart.

Kate:
Isn’t that fun?

Carolina Moore:
Yes.

Kate:
Yeah, it’s a beautiful memory for me. Yeah, so that’s how I started getting into quilting. But then the group stayed together and what we did was every year we made a quilt as a group and we would raffle it off and raise money for our patients, so that we could pay for transportation to the doctor for a patient who didn’t have it or an aide to stay with a family member so they could go to the doctor or something like that.

Carolina Moore:
So you were a guild basically without being an official guild and you had a mission and …

Kate:
Yes.

Carolina Moore:
… you had a community?

Kate:
Exactly. And when I started, I was the newbie, of course.

Carolina Moore:
Of course.

Kate:
I hadn’t even taken a class, but by the end, I was helping pick out the patterns, I was tweaking the patterns, I was helping pick out the fabrics. So it was a really great learning experience and that’s how I fell into thinking, “Oh, wait, I like tweaking everything. Maybe I could design my own.” Yeah, so that’s how I got started. Kind of a long story, but-

Carolina Moore:
No, it’s a great long … I love long stories. They’re the best. When someone says, “It’s a long story,” that’s the story I want to hear.

Kate:
Right.

Carolina Moore:
And then usually, it’s not a long story, it’s just an uncomfortable story, but I want to hear the long, long stories.

Kate:
Well, because it’s so interesting. We all come at it from a different place. Sometimes people have family members who quilted. Sometimes people just knew somebody or a neighbor or a grandmother or whatever. And my mom sewed, but she never quilted. So I just fell into it and I loved it and I’ve been doing it ever since.

Carolina Moore:
So you started designing your own patterns?

Kate:
Yeah, so I left the VNA and I went to work at a nursing home. And the woman I shared an office with, she was like the nursing department secretary. She was crafty. She’d made a few quilts and we kept talking about, “Wouldn’t it be fun to do something other than work in a nursing home?”

Carolina Moore:
Right.

Kate:
So I told her how I wanted to design stuff and she’s like, “Well, I could be the tester,” and so that’s how we started our business and we called, Seams Like A Dream Quilt Designs because it seemed like a dream to do something creative and was different than working in a nursing home.

Carolina Moore:
But you spelled it S-E-A-M, Seams Like A Dream?

Kate:
Oh, yes.

Carolina Moore:
We love a pun.

Kate:
Oh, yes, we did. So that’s how I started the business. And our very first pattern, we called it, Seams Like A Dream Quilt Designs, but our very first pattern was a bag. And it was the cute little bag. It was called the Four Star Tote, a prosaic name because there was, oh, wait, two stars on one side and two stars on the other side, so it had four stars.

Carolina Moore:
But honestly, I love names that are descriptive because you don’t have to remember like, “It’s a tissue. Oh, it’s a Kleenex?”

Kate:
Right.

Carolina Moore:
“No, no, no, it’s a tissue because it’s a tissue. You call it what it is.”

Kate:
You call it what it is, yes. And it used five-fat quarters and we, our very first pattern, we managed to get in Keepsake Quilting catalog.

Carolina Moore:
Look at you go.

Kate:
Right, because what we did was we ordered one of their fat quarter packs, made the bag and sent it to them.

Carolina Moore:
Smart girl.

Kate:
Yup, it was in there for two years.

Carolina Moore:
So you made a million dollars and you retired.

Kate:
No, because we all know pattern designing is not like that, but yes, it was great. It was something that launched us. Do you know what I mean? So then from there, we learned all about, “Oh, Quilt Market. What’s Quilt Market? Oh, it’s a quilt trade show. You should go see what that is.” So we went to Quilt Market and figured that out and figured out what it was. We got approached by a magazine who said, “Oh, would you like to put that in our magazine?” Well, heck yeah. Wish you would.” We had quilt shops locally where we tried to sell them the patterns and they said, “Oh, do you teach?” And we said, “Sure, we teach.”

Carolina Moore:
“We will once we teach at your shop.”

Kate:
“Yes, we will. We will be teachers. So we just fell into it, because when we started it, we were both working full time. I had three kids, Elizabeth had a kid and so we were doing this as our part-time, sort of a hobby business. We took it seriously and we were making it a business and we were investing in our business and we were doing all sorts of new things, but at the same point in time, I had a full-time job and I had three kids and she had a full-time job and she had a kid. So it was definitely part-time. It did help pay for our fabric stash, which was good.

Carolina Moore:
Right. I find a lot of people, when they get into the industry, it’s like, “Well, it will pay for my hobby.”

Kate:
Right.

Carolina Moore:
And then at some point, you have to make a decision of, “Okay, is this paying for my hobby or is this paying for my house?”

Kate:
Right.

Carolina Moore:
And you look at it a little different when it’s paying for your hobby because, “Okay, I’ll buy less fabric this month,” versus you can’t tell the mortgage company, “Oh, I’m going to just pay a little less mortgage this month.”

Kate:
Right. Yeah, because I had to buy a little more extra fabric and I didn’t sell enough patterns to pay the mortgage. Right.

Carolina Moore:
Right?

Kate:
Yes. Yup, so interestingly, so we were doing this together, but we were doing it together in one state. Elizabeth moved twice, then I moved across the country. We had a wonderful opportunity to write a book with C&T Publishing.

Carolina Moore:
Oh, fabulous.

Kate:
It’s called Smash Your Precut Stash because I am a bit of a precut nut. I love precut.

Carolina Moore:
Who isn’t?

Kate:
I know. My favorite though to be honest with you is fat quarters.

Carolina Moore:
Because they’re so versatile and you can use it for anything.

Kate:
Right?

Carolina Moore:
And you can always cut them up into smaller sizes. If you need 10-inch squares, cut them into 10 inches. You need five-inch squares, cut them into five inches.

Kate:
Exactly.

Carolina Moore:
You need two-and-a-half-inch strips, cut them into two-and-a-half-inch strips.

Kate:
Right. So you just need two of those strips to make one of the regular strips. It’s perfect, right?

Carolina Moore:
Yeah.

Kate:
And when they put them in the little bundles and they tie them with the little ribbons and then some of them are going in different directions, oh my gosh, I mean-

Carolina Moore:
And they’re in rainbow order or color gradient order.

Kate:
Yes, exactly.

Carolina Moore:
So collecting fabric and sewing with fabric are two completely different hobbies. A lot of people have both hobbies, but they are two different hobbies.

Kate:
Right.

Carolina Moore:
And I would like someone to explain to me why. No one has ever asked a coin collector like, “When are you going to spend that money?”

Kate:
Right, but they ask-

Carolina Moore:
No one’s ever asked a stamp collector, “When are you going to mail a letter with that stamp?” But us, fabric collectors, we get asked all the time, “When are you going to make something with that fabric?”

Kate:
Oh, I know. And one of the things I say in one of my lectures is exactly that.

Carolina Moore:
I might’ve gotten it from there, [inaudible].

Kate:
And I sit there and I say, “Now you are the curator of your collection and you get to decide if that fat quarter bundle is part of your permanent collection and just there to make you happy just like the painting on the wall.”

Carolina Moore:
Nice, or it can be a temporary exhibit that comes down and becomes a quilt or a bag or anything else.

Kate:
Right.

Carolina Moore:
Or gets destashed.

Kate:
Or gets destashed, but either way, you get to choose what to do with it. You are the curator.

Carolina Moore:
Yes.

Kate:
So anyway, it was a fun start. It was a great way to dip into the business without it having to be my sole income generating. But when my husband and I moved across the country, the deal was, if he was moving me across the country, I didn’t have to work as a nurse and I could invest in the business more.

Carolina Moore:
Okay. Yes, we all make these bargains at some point of some kind, some kind of bargain like, “Here’s the deal.”

Kate:
Yes. Yeah. So that’s when I started doing on my own more like magazine quilts. We had done a few together, but I was starting to do more on my own. So I was doing more magazine quilts. I got classes on Craftsy. I got a couple classes on Quilting Daily. I was actually just recently on a couple of Love of Quilting episodes, which was really fun.

Carolina Moore:
Nice. Yeah, that’s fun.

Kate:
Yeah, so I was trying to make it a real business.

Carolina Moore:
Well, you did make it a real business.

Kate:
Yes. Yes, I did.

Carolina Moore:
Yes, you did. But there’s this, we talk about it sometimes in the industry that there’s this imposter syndrome, right? Fake it until you make it.

Kate:
It’s huge.

Carolina Moore:
And that until someone validates you that you are a business, it just feels like, “Okay, I’ve got this pretend hobby,” because so many people who don’t understand the quilting industry go, “Oh yeah, she’s got this little hobby …”

Kate:
Right.

Carolina Moore:
… and they don’t know the dollars behind it, but they also don’t know the stress. You are doing as many … You’re putting as many hours as a CEO of a Fortune 500.

Kate:
Absolutely, absolutely. And I think that, because it’s considered crafty, it doesn’t have the same value to other people. They don’t perceive it the same way. It should because it’s not just crafty. Do you know what I mean? I think what we do when we’re designers, we’re designing quilt patterns. We’re designing fabric. We’re designing tools. What we’re doing is, what’s the word I want, as important in a way, but also as artistic and as intricate as an engineer or an artist. And we are in our own way, we’re quilt artists.

Carolina Moore:
Well, because it is a labor of love doesn’t mean it’s not still labor.

Kate:
Right, right. And doesn’t mean it doesn’t have value, right?

Carolina Moore:
Yeah.

Kate:
Yeah, so anyway, so that’s where we got. So-

Carolina Moore:
So you’re making pattern, you’re writing patterns, you were in magazines, and then at some point you decided, “I’m going to make some acrylic templates”?

Kate:
So the book that I mentioned with C&T, Smash Your Precut Stash, so we made quilts that used a jelly roll or charm squares or fat quarters because I consider fat quarters precuts.

Carolina Moore:
Oh, they are.

Kate:
Yes, absolutely, because they come to me precut.

Carolina Moore:
Yup, they’re not on the bolt.

Kate:
No, they’re not on the bolt. And I designed this one quilt that had a braid. Now, I had never made a braid before, but I designed a braid quilt.

Carolina Moore:
And they’re gorgeous. If someone hasn’t made a braid quilt before or seen them, you should look them up. I’ll put links in the notes like the braids-

Kate:
They’re fun and they’re versatile and there’s so many different things you can do with a braid once you’ve learned how to make it. And they look more complicated than they are.

Carolina Moore:
And I love that when I get to make a project that people are like, “Oh my gosh, you made that. How long did it take you?” Oh, you don’t want to know. It took a weekend. You don’t want to know that.”

Kate:
“You don’t want to know that,” right?

Carolina Moore:
And they’re thinking, “Oh, it took months, years of tedious sewing.”

Kate:
Right.

Carolina Moore:
But if you know the right techniques and you have the right tools-

Kate:
It makes all the difference.

Carolina Moore:
Yes. Okay, so you made this braid quilt.

Kate:
So I made the break quilt in the book. And in the book, we drew a little diagram that you can use and cut out a template plastic or-

Carolina Moore:
Or out of a cereal box?

Kate:
Or out of a cereal box. Good call. Or you probably could also tape it off on your ruler. But after I did it, I thought, “I want to make more braid quilts, but I don’t always want to have to make the same size. So what can I do to have something that will make multiple different size braids?” So I came up with a tool and so it’s the shape of a braid piece with an angle and it’s got lines on both sides. So it’s got lines on the straight side and lines on the angled side. So what that allows you to do is it allows you to cut different size braids. The smaller you cut your braid, the skinnier braid is. The longer you cut your braid piece, the wider your braid ends up.

Carolina Moore:
I love that you have one tool to do all the sizes. If I want to do a big one, I don’t need a small, medium, large. I don’t need a two-inch or three-inch or four-inch or five-inch. One tool is going to rule them all.

Kate:
Right, right. So the tool works with strips up to three inches wide and then it cuts pieces from five-and-three-quarter inches up to eight and a half. Yeah, so it’s got lines like for all the quarter inches in between. So it works out really well. So you can make braids with skinny strips. You can make braids with fatter strips. You can make braids with skinny strips that are skinny braids or wide braids. So it just gives you some versatility. You can even combine skinny strips with wide strips.

Carolina Moore:
And a braid doesn’t require any curves or any Y seams, so it actually is just simple, straight piecing, but looks like you’re a rockstar.

Kate:
Yeah. So I have this one table runner. It’s called table scraps because …

Carolina Moore:
I love that.

Kate:
… I made it out of my scraps.

Carolina Moore:
And it goes on the table.

Kate:
And it goes on the table.

Carolina Moore:
We love a pun.

Kate:
And what’s really fun is that, so you make a braid and then you just trim it. So you make this long braid and I like to call sewing braid, Sunday sewing. Because all you do is add a piece and press it, then you add another piece and press it, and then you add another piece and press it. There are no points to match if your quarter inches is a little bit off.

Carolina Moore:
Wait, no points to match?

Kate:
No points to match.

Carolina Moore:
You are speaking my language.

Kate:
Right, because all you do is just line up your two straight edges and then sew and then you just press it and you add another piece. And because you’ve already cut the angle, you can see the sides of your braid, which is really cool.

Carolina Moore:
Nice.

Kate:
And then you can just trim it. And so if you’re a little bit off on the edges, you trim what I like to call the wobbly bits.

Carolina Moore:
The wobbly bits.

Kate:
The wobbly bits. You just trim the wobbly bits. You just trim off the bottom, you trim off the top and you’ve got a perfect square or a perfect rectangle, whatever it is you need for your braid project.

Carolina Moore:
You can spend all Sunday just sewing the other braid, watching Netflix, watching whatever …

Kate:
Right.

Carolina Moore:
… watching a video, and at the end, you have this braid. And when people say, “What are you going to do with that?” You can say, “I don’t know yet because it might become a table runner, it might become a quilt.” You put it into anything.

Kate:
Right. It might become a place mat. Right.

Carolina Moore:
Oh, fabulous.

Kate:
Think about it, when I was just teaching one of my classes with the braid this past week at a guild, this woman had bought a panel. So she took the class, we were making table runners and she said, “I hope you don’t mind. I’m not going to make a table runner.” I said, “I don’t care what you make. It’s fine.”

Carolina Moore:
Most teachers won’t mind, yeah.

Kate:
She wanted to surround a panel with a braided border.

Carolina Moore:
Oh, clever.

Kate:
Right?

Carolina Moore:
And you just need to put one on the top, one on the bottom and then one on each side or one on each side and then one on the top and one on the bottom and you’re done.

Kate:
Right, and you’re done.

Carolina Moore:
And your quarters-

Kate:
Exactly. So you could just make braided borders and you can decide as you’re making them, “Do I want my braid to go up one side and then do I want to break in the corner as it goes along the top or do I want to do something that pulls them together?” There’s just so many options.

Carolina Moore:
Sure.

Kate:
So one of the things we were going to do with her, because she and I hashed out what she was going to do, so she was going to add a small framing border around her panel. It was going to be a light fabric. And then she was going to add that light fabric to the beginning and end of her braid, so the braid floated around the panel. Doesn’t that sound like fun?

Carolina Moore:
Yeah.

Kate:
I know, right?

Carolina Moore:
Yeah, and you can create your own gradients and …

Kate:
Oh, my gosh-

Carolina Moore:
… rainbows and-

Kate:
You can add squares in them. There’s just so many different things you can do to a braid. So you can cut squares that are the same width as your braid pieces. And so you add the squares to all the braid pieces on one side, and then when you sew the braid pieces together, you get a square going up almost like a diamond through the middle.

Carolina Moore:
What?

Kate:
Yeah. Very cool.

Carolina Moore:
This is craziness.

Kate:
Yeah, so it’s a fun technique and I think what I like most about it is that a beginner can do it. It can look complicated, but if their quarter inch is just a hair off, it doesn’t matter. So if their strip isn’t quite long enough and the pattern said, “Use 16 pieces,” and they use 16 and it doesn’t work, well, then just add two more.

Carolina Moore:
I know.

Kate:
What’s the big deal, right? You just add two more pieces.

Carolina Moore:
My favorite steam allowance is the quarter inch-ish.

Kate:
Yes.

Carolina Moore:
It might be a little scant, it might be a little generous, I don’t know …

Kate:
Right.

Carolina Moore:
… but I don’t have to worry about that …

Kate:
Right.

Carolina Moore:
… and that it’s still going to look amazing. And that someone who looks at it, they can’t tell.

Kate:
They can’t tell.

Carolina Moore:
Because that’s another thing that we quilters, “Oh, that looks amazing,” “Yeah, but I had to add two strips.” They’ll never know. Don’t tell them.

Kate:
Don’t tell them. I know. And I had somebody email me and say, “My braid wasn’t quite as long as you said it would be,” and I said, “That’s okay. That’s just because you have your own personal quarter inch. Add two more pieces,” and she’s like, “Oh, okay,” right? Easy-peasy. When you’re especially first learning to quilt and you learn all about when I have an angled piece and I’m laying things right sides together and I’m matching up edges and I come out on something that’s got an angle, there’s a little notch there, well, what if you miss the notch, right?

Carolina Moore:
Yes.

Kate:
Well, if you’re doing a braid and you’ve cut your pieces, then you just trim those little edges off and little bits that you’re off aren’t going to matter because you just trim it to size, “A little bit off here. A little bit off here. You’re good. It looks perfect.”

Carolina Moore:
Nice.

Kate:
And what’s really fun is when you cut a braid, and it’s hard because you can’t see what I’m talking about, but when you cut a braid, sometimes you get at the bottom of your cut or at the top a tiny little triangle. And your friends will look at your table runner or your quilt and say, “How did you piece that tiny little triangle in there?” They don’t know that all you did was make a braid and whack it off, right?

Carolina Moore:
Yeah. And you’ll say, “I’m that good.”

Kate:
“I’m that good,” exactly.

Carolina Moore:
“I’m just that good.”

Kate:
Now, I do have to admit that I do have a second braid and that’s because I wanted to make a little braid to use as an accent.

Carolina Moore:
Like an itsy-bitsy braid?

Kate:
Yeah, like an accent on a bag. I also did it as a headband.

Carolina Moore:
Oh, nice.

Kate:
Just made a braid and then put some elastic at the bottom.

Carolina Moore:
Sure.

Kate:
Yeah. I did it on a tote bag. So I wanted to make a smaller one and I realized that, if I tried to put the lines on the big one, there’d be overlapping lines. So you’d have straight lines on top of angled lines and it would be …

Carolina Moore:
Too much.

Kate:
… too much and confusing. So I did come out with a-

Carolina Moore:
And not everybody wants to do itty-bitty piecing.

Kate:
Right.

Carolina Moore:
Itty-bitty piecing, there are some of us who love itty-bitty piecing and there’s some of us who never want to see itty-bitty piecing in our life.

Kate:
Right.

Carolina Moore:
And that’s okay. So you’ve made one just for the itty-bitty piecers.

Kate:
Exactly. So it makes these little tiny braids and you can use an inch strip or an inch-and-a-half strip. And what’s really funny is making those braids is no harder than making the bigger braids because all it is you just sew a straight line and press it and sew a straight line and press it.

Carolina Moore:
You just again look like a rockstar.

Kate:
Exactly.

Carolina Moore:
“You pieced that tiny stuff? How did you not go blind?”

Kate:
Right. And people think that it looks so complicated like, “Oh my gosh.” The only difference is when you’re using smaller pieces or especially skinnier braid strips, it takes more braid pieces to get the length. It takes longer to get the length, but it’s no harder. It’s just straight line sewing. So it’s perfect when you’re just sitting there on a Sunday afternoon and you got a podcast on or a movie on or whatever and you just, “Tut, tut, tut, tut, tut,” sew, “Tut, tut, tut, tut, tut,” sew.

Carolina Moore:
Nice.

Kate:
Yeah.

Carolina Moore:
Now, I was looking at your site and the braid template is not your only template, is it?

Kate:
No, I have also a Drunkard’s Path template.

Carolina Moore:
Okay, so for people who want to do curves.

Kate:
Yes, so for people who want to do curves. So here’s the funny story about that. So have you ever heard of the Quilter’s Planner?

Carolina Moore:
Yes.

Kate:
Okay. So the Quilter’s Planner came out and I submitted a quilt to the Quilter’s Planner and it was a Drunkard’s Path. And again, I had never done a Drunkard’s Path.

Carolina Moore:
Well, just throw your hat over the fence and do it.

Kate:
Right.

Carolina Moore:
Why not?

Kate:
Right.

Carolina Moore:
You can do braids, you can do anything.

Kate:
Exactly. That’s what I figured, right? So they accepted it. So I had to figure out how to do it. Well, the Drunkard’s Path that I drafted, there wasn’t a template for that size.

Carolina Moore:
Gosh, darn it.

Kate:
I know. So I did the quilt, I did it with template plastic. It was just …

Carolina Moore:
Fine.

Kate:
Fine. You can do that. It’s fine. But then, and it was in the Quilter’s Planner, and then after the planner had been out a while, the rights reverted back to me and I thought, “All right, I want to put this out as a pattern, and I want to do a second quilt with it, so I want a template.” So that’s what I did.

Carolina Moore:
Well, we’re quilters, we need all the notions, we need all the templates.

Kate:
Somebody asked me the other day because when I was teaching them to do the braid and she said, “Well, Kate, couldn’t I do this with my regular ruler?” And I said, “Of course, you can. And that’s why I give you a diagram. You could absolutely do with your regular ruler. It’s just harder. Any template, its job is to make something easier.” So when people sit there and say, “Oh, well, I have a regular ruler. I can figure this out.” You’re right. You can’t.

Carolina Moore:
Sure.

Kate:
But the template just makes it easier. Just-

Carolina Moore:
Yup, I was just having a conversation with someone of like, “Well, what do you value more?”

Kate:
Right.

Carolina Moore:
“Do you value your time or do you value your money? Because you trade a little bit of your money for this template and now you’ve got a bunch of time back.”

Kate:
Exactly, because you don’t have to figure it out. And I think that’s what the job is of any template or any ruler. It’s just to make your life easier.

Carolina Moore:
Quilting, original quilting was pieces of cardboard or pieces of paper templates that were traced onto fabric, that were cut with scissors and that were sewn together by hand. And now we use acrylic templates and we cut them with rotary cutters and we sew them together with sewing machines. So our tools have gotten fancier and that helps us be more accurate and put it together faster.

Kate:
Exactly.

Carolina Moore:
But the purpose is still the same and anyone can still go get paper templates and use scissors and hand sew it. That’s still a valid way to make a quilt. None of these other tools are invalidating the other way, but it’s just accommodating all the other things we want to do in our life.

Kate:
Well, exactly, and it’s a tradeoff and you get to decide. Each person gets to decide for themselves …

Carolina Moore:
Absolutely.

Kate:
… “Which way do I want to go?” Do you know what I mean? “Which thing am I going to use?” and I think what’s fun about some templates, some make a certain specific thing, right?

Carolina Moore:
Yes.

Kate:
And mine, obviously, a braid template or my Drunkard’s Path make a specific thing, but what I love about the braid is that you can be so creative with it on your own. You don’t necessarily need me to help you make a quilt because you could sit there and say, “All right, I learned how to make the braid from Kate and maybe I made her table runner or I made one of her quilts, but now I know what to do, so now I can apply my creativity and do something new and different with it.”

Carolina Moore:
And you’ve given all of us a way to take our scraps and turn them into larger, usable pieces, “Now my scraps become a border,” “Now my scraps become a bag.”

Kate:
Exactly.

Carolina Moore:
“Now my scraps become usable strips of fabric.”

Kate:
Yup. One of the ladies who took a class from me a couple of years ago at a guild, she came with all leftover fabrics that were Christmas fabrics. Because over the years, she has made all of her kids and grandkids a Christmas quilt and she had this huge thing of leftover pieces. So she cut them all into two-and-a-half-inch strips. She didn’t have a full strip of most of it, but that’s all right. She just folded it in half, cut the braid pieces that she could and just made these scrappy table runners with Christmas fabric for everybody for the holidays this year.

Carolina Moore:
Oh.

Kate:
I know, isn’t that fun?

Carolina Moore:
That is so fun.

Kate:
I know. I tried to see if I could get on the list.

Carolina Moore:
Yes, there are some quilters that need to adopt me. I agree. I’m with you.

Kate:
Yeah. But yeah, I love watching people be creative with this. Like the woman who wanted to do a border, this woman who wanted to make them all Christmas quilts. I had a woman who was going to make her own braid quilt and she decided it was going to go, and it’s hard to describe it, it was going to go up one side, cross the top down, over the bottom and then come in almost-

Carolina Moore:
So like a snail shell?

Kate:
Yes.

Carolina Moore:
Or a spiral?

Kate:
Or a spiral. Yes, exactly. And I thought, “Oh, won’t that be cool?”

Carolina Moore:
Yes.

Kate:
I know.

Carolina Moore:
I think that as notion designers, that is one of the best things, is that we come up with this idea and we say, “Okay, I’m going to solve this problem that exists in this industry because I’ve experienced it. I want it to be fixed and no one else out there is fixing it, so I’m going to fix it.” And so we come up with a solution. And then once we put this solution into other quilters’ hands, they say, “Oh, did you know that it does this?” “I had no idea.” “And did you know you could do this with this?” “Oh my gosh, this is amazing.”

Kate:
Right.

Carolina Moore:
And almost shamefully, we get to take a little bit of credit for that, but not really. But it’s like you have all these children out in the world that you helped. I don’t know, I mean it’s a quilting midwifery, I guess, to create these products that everyone else gets to give birth to these creations with.

Kate:
Exactly. And what I love about is I love when quilters take my pattern and do something different with it. I’ve had people take a class from me and they’ll come up and they’ll say, “Now, Kate, I didn’t pick the same fabrics this year.” I say, “That’s perfect because I want you to pick fabrics that talk to you, not what I put on the cover and I can’t wait to see what you do that’s different, how this inspired you to be more creative.”

Carolina Moore:
So I have learned that when quilters are picking the fabrics that are on the cover, I feel like … So my experience says that the big reason that quilters are picking the fabrics that are on the cover is because a quilt is going to take you a long time. It’s going to take hours, days, weeks, maybe months. And if I’m going to put hours, days, weeks, months, in addition to all those dollars into this project, I want to know that …

Kate:
That it’s going to work.

Carolina Moore:
… the end project is going to look good. And if I pick the same fabrics on the cover, then it’ll look like the cover quilt and it will look good. But the other side, and good … I mean, we all want our things to look good.

Kate:
Right.

Carolina Moore:
But the quilters who pick their own fabrics, they want it to have their personality and your personality will always look good. Your personality is always in style.

Kate:
Right. And so many quilters, that’s the hardest thing, right? Now, of course, I’m also now a fabric designer, so of course, I love it when they pick the fabrics I pick …

Carolina Moore:
Sure.

Kate:
… because it’s, “Oh, wait, my fabric now.” But the other thing is you do want them to find their own style. And I think one of the best tips you can give someone is, if they’re looking at a quilt on a cover and they’re trying to pick their own fabrics and they want to make sure it’s going to look good, pay attention to value.

Carolina Moore:
Yes. So your darks, your lights, your mediums.

Kate:
Right, yup.

Carolina Moore:
Yup, and how they play together and play off each other.

Kate:
Exactly. So look where the designer put the lights, medium and dark. Do you like where she put them or you just want different colors? Then use colors you like, but follow her value placements and you’ll know that your colors will work for that quilt because you follow the same value.

Carolina Moore:
This is a great tip because you can have a quilt that is red and blue. And if it’s a dark solid red and a solid navy to Kelly blue, that red and blue will read as the same color.

Kate:
Exactly.

Carolina Moore:
And so your quilt will be very flat. But if instead you use that dark, dark red, like a blood red, but then picked a light blue, now the red is popping off the blue. Or if you chose a much lighter shade of red, almost a pink and then your navy, now they’re popping off each other.

Kate:
Right, because we know this statement that color gets all the credit, value does all the work.

Carolina Moore:
Yes. I haven’t actually heard that. So color gets all the credit and value …

Kate:
Does all the work.

Carolina Moore:
… does all the work. What else in my life do I know that follows this model? Okay, color gets all the credit, value does all the work. Yes.

Kate:
Right. And I think that it’s mostly true.

Carolina Moore:
Sure.

Kate:
One of the things I love to talk about, I love to talk about color. I just think it’s so much fun. And I love to tell people, “Look, I was a nurse. I wasn’t trained in color. I wasn’t trained as an artist or I didn’t go to design school.”

Carolina Moore:
Most of us aren’t trained in color.

Kate:
Right, exactly, but we learn little bits over time by experimenting. And your stash is really good for experimenting and using patterns where you can just do some scrappy stuff allows you to experiment with color and value and how colors play off of each other.

Carolina Moore:
The thing I like to tell people is take a picture of it, because for some reason, the picture will read different. The eye of my camera sees different than the eye in my head. So even when the eye in my head is looking at the picture that the eye that my camera gave, it looks different.

Kate:
It does.

Carolina Moore:
So when you see something and you think, “Okay, I think so,” take a picture of it and look at that picture. And then as a benefit, when you later go, “Oh, what was I looking at?” you have a picture to reference. And now cellphone photos, it costs us nothing. Digital photos cost nothing to make.

Kate:
Exactly. Digital is free, right?

Carolina Moore:
Yup.

Kate:
And a good way too when you’re picking out fabrics and if you’re thinking about value, we’ve all heard that you take the black and white photo, so that you can see the value change. But part of doing that also is, as you take a picture of those fabrics and you do see them differently, I don’t know if it’s because it’s small and it’s almost like we’re farther away now, could be, right? I’m not sure.

Carolina Moore:
I feel like the photo’s also flattened it, so you’ve removed all the dimension from the photo.

Kate:
Right. And the other thing too is because it’s flattened it, because you’re not as focused now on the exact blue in that flower matches the exact blue in the background of this, you’re less focused on that and you can see them as a whole. Because how many times do you put a quilt together and this blue matches the blue in this pattern beautifully and these look so beautiful together and then you put them in the quilt and you think, “Meeh, it didn’t come out.”

Carolina Moore:
They’re not playing well.

Kate:
They’re not playing well because usually we overmatch. We match them so much, we lose the value change. And the value change is what allows those design elements to stand out, right?

Carolina Moore:
Yes. You did all that extra piecing to get little stars or little whatevers to show up and then you can’t even see it, it all just blends in.

Kate:
It all just blends in. Yup. So I think your tip of taking the photograph is huge, because especially if you take a picture of all the fabrics, you don’t want them to look like they’ve all blended together and they coordinate beautifully. You want to see some value change.

Carolina Moore:
We all have scrappy quilts.

Kate:
Yes, yup, and you need that. The other fun color tip is to think about the unexpected visitor. So you’re making a quilt, let’s just say. You’re making a quilt and it’s primarily blues. And there’s a few little colors. Maybe you have a print in there with some other colors in it, but it’s blues and it’s greens and everything else and you’re looking at it and everything coordinates really great. But when you take that picture, you realize it’s a little flat.

Carolina Moore:
Little monochromatic, yup.

Kate:
Right. And monochromatic can be good, but you need massive value change for it to really work. But the other thing that’s fun sometimes is pick a color that maybe either is in the print or is a complement to one of the colors in the print and add just a little bit of it in. Maybe you add it in as a star point, right? Or if you’re doing flowers, it’s the center of the flowers. And that unexpected color suddenly lets everything else shine.

Carolina Moore:
Nice. And because you’ve given … The funny thing that I also find is that sometimes I’ll pick a fabric and I’ll be like, “Oh, this isn’t really what I want, but it’s what I have, so I’ll put it in.” But once you sew all the pieces together, the act of stitching has made it intentional. And so the act of it being intentionally there makes of it.

Kate:
Yes, yes. There is that too. Absolutely. And I think it’s just getting out of the matchy head and thinking about, “How can I just give it a little interest?” and being careful about where you place it so that it doesn’t take over, but it just complements everything else and lets everything else shine.

Carolina Moore:
Nice.

Kate:
Yeah, I love that idea. So I remember learning little bits about color makes such a difference.

Carolina Moore:
It really does and it makes you feel more confident in a project and confident to buy all those things to be able to make the project knowing, “Okay, this doesn’t look like the cover, but it’s going to be great.”

Kate:
Exactly, yup, yup. And so you just get your clues from the quilt that is there and you think less about color and more about value. I wonder if it would work to … I’m just thinking about this.

Carolina Moore:
Sure.

Kate:
I wonder if it would work is, if you have a cover quilt and you want to make it, but you want different colors if you took a black and white of it. Because then you would be picking colors …

Carolina Moore:
Based of value.

Kate:
… purely off value. I wonder if that would work. I have no idea. I’m just thinking out loud.

Carolina Moore:
I’d be interested in that. All right, someone needs to try that and let us know how it works.

Kate:
Yes, absolutely. We’d love to hear.

Carolina Moore:
All right, Kate, it’s been so fun chatting with you and I hope everyone else has enjoyed this conversation as well.

Kate:
I’ve had so much fun talking with you.

Carolina Moore:
Oh, not only did we learn about your braid template and we all want to run out and go make braids now, but we’ve learned about color and value. And this is why I love having conversations with quilters, because usually, I know them from one thing.

Kate:
Right.

Carolina Moore:
Like you do this one thing, but really as quilters, we do so many things and we get to find out so many other things as well. So-

Kate:
Yes. Well, thank you so much for having me.

Carolina Moore:
Of course.

Kate:
Yay.

Carolina Moore:
Friends, that’s our episode for today. I hope you loved it as much as I loved having this conversation. Remember that you can find all the details that we talked about in the show notes and those are all at ilovenotions.com. And make sure to leave this podcast a review in your favorite podcasting app. Leaving it a review will help the podcast algorithm show this podcast to other people who love notions just as much as we do. Friends, that’s all I have for you today, but I will see you right here real soon. Bye for now.

The post Kate Colleran – Kate Colleran Designs, LLC appeared first on i love notions.

Purple Hobbies has embraced 3D printing to make fabulous quilting notions! They have an entire “farm” of 3D printers that make their products, and the most popular products become 3D injection molded overseas to keep up with demand.

I hope you enjoy this conversation with Heather as we learn about so many of her fantastic notions!

Show Notes:

Check out all Heather’s fabulous notions at the Purple Hobbies Website.
You can find the Blade Saver Thread Cutter here.
Check out the Purple Hobbies Website here.

Listen to the episode:

Follow these links to popular podcast players:

Listen and subscribe here on Apple Podcasts
Listen and subscribe here on Spotify
Listen and Subscribe here on Google Podcasts

Transcript of my interview with Heather of Purple Hobbies

Carolina Moore:
I love notions and I’m guessing that you do too. Hey there, friend, it’s Carolina Moore, your favorite sewing and quilting YouTuber, and now podcaster, here with another episode.
Today we are here with Heather Snow, and if you don’t know her name, you certainly know her company, Purple Hobbies, and I know you know that because they have so many incredible notions, I’m sure you have at least one sitting on your sewing table right now, but I’ll let you discover those as we go through today’s episode. So let me introduce to you Heather Snow.

Heather:
Hi.

Carolina Moore:
Hi. Tell us about how you got started on your quilty journey.

Heather:
My quilty journey started as being a maker and wanting to create things around me and solve problems. Quilting is a problem solving thing because you are making a gift, you’re making a blanket, you are showing how much you care. My very first quilt was handmade. I took a class, I moved to California straight out of college, and I didn’t know anybody, so I had a lot of spare time, so I saw this quilting class and I thought, I want to do that. I wanted to make something special for my grandparents. And so that was my first quilt, was a handmade quilt, just a little sampler, but it was wonderful and I was hooked.

Carolina Moore:
That’s fabulous. What part of California, by the way?

Heather:
Northern California, we live in Sunnyvale.

Carolina Moore:
Oh, that’s so funny. I lived in San Jose for years and years, and my in-laws live up in the East Bay, Antioch area.

Heather:
I’m originally from Pennsylvania, but I’ve been in California longer than I lived in Pennsylvania, so I think I’m a Californian now.

Carolina Moore:
We’ll accept you, 100%, for sure.

Heather:
Thank you.

Carolina Moore:
I wasn’t born here either though, but still I’ve been here most of my life, so I think so. Okay. So you fell in love with quilting after making that first quilt.

Heather:
Yep. And there are so many different kinds of quilts and so many different techniques, it’s just addictive.

Carolina Moore:
Absolutely.

Heather:
So the way that I started my business was kind of by accident. I have always been quilting in my spare time. I had a high-tech job and quilting has always been a way for me to relax and do something with my hands, do something real instead of theoretical. And I was fortunate enough to be able to leave my high-tech job and right around that time there were a lot of fires here in Northern California, and so I was quilting like crazy. And I was going through lots of rotary blades and making lots of piecing and doing lots of chain piecing, and I just thought, there’s got to be something we can do with these blades, and I really did not like the chain piece cutters that were on the market, and I just thought there’s got to be a way that we can use these blades instead of throwing them away, and the Blade Saver Thread Cutter was born.
The very first sample that I made was, it looked like a little Ferris wheel. It was a little triangle with a little wheel. It was very ugly, but it did have my logo. The logo always was the blade holder. But the whole case, my youngest son is very mechanically inclined and he looked at what I was doing and he said, “Mom, it would be so much better if you made a case for it and had the slot be the thing that makes it stand up.” So it was instrumental in the final design of the Blade Saver Thread Cutter.

Carolina Moore:
That’s fantastic.

Heather:
Yeah.

Carolina Moore:
So you said that you were making a lot of quilts because of the fires. Was that that you’re making them for people who had lost their homes or possessions in the fires?

Heather:
Yes. Yes, absolutely. I was making quilts as fast as I could and donating them, and I still get sad when I saw photos of people in line for quilts. So think about it, you lose your home, you have nothing, and you’re in a hotel and it can’t feel like home because you have nothing that’s your own. And people were standing, they were in these huge long lines, it looked like a Black Friday line, but they were standing there because they were able to choose a quilt and have it be their own so that they could start having some new semblance of home. It breaks my heart to think of people losing everything beyond their control, and it just made me feel good to be able to do something to help because you feel so helpless.

Carolina Moore:
Sure, absolutely. That’s incredible though. That’s phenomenal. And also I think there’s a lot of quilters who can relate to that. Many of us have made quilts for different … or donated quilts, made a quilt and didn’t know where it was supposed to go, and then there was a tragedy and we knew, okay, this is where this quilts supposed to go. This is where it’s supposed to have its life.

Heather:
Yes.

Carolina Moore:
So you decided you wanted to be able to recycle those rotary blades. You came up with a Blade Saver Thread Cutter. Were you just printing it on a 3D printer at that point point?

Heather:
Yes. Yeah.

Carolina Moore:
That’s so clever.

Heather:
Yeah, that’s one of the things when I left my high-tech job, I actually went back to school to learn how to do 3D modeling. And that’s what encouraged me to start the business because suddenly I was able to take the ideas in my head and turn them into real things in my hands. So we’re completely addicted to 3D printing.

Carolina Moore:
That’s fabulous. So I didn’t know which was your first notion. The first notion of yours that I was introduced to was the Blade Saver Thread Cutter. And if people haven’t seen it, we’ll make sure that there are links in the show notes, but it is this ingenious little device, kind of looks like a snowflake that you unscrew, put your rotary blade in, screw back together, and now you can cut all your chains and chain piecing on your recycled or upcycled rotary blade and use all the different edges of it. And then I love the case because you can pop open the case, put the blade portion inside, and now it’s fully protected, not that the blade was exposed, but it’s fully protected of bumping into anything in your bag and you just throw it in your bag to take on retreats or on a sew day with you. It’s so handy.

Heather:
I’m glad you like it. One of the things that was really important to me was to make it so that you couldn’t get your fingers in there. Some of the other cutters on the market have a wide gap and they just made me nervous. So with mine, you can’t, even if you try, you can’t get your finger to the blade, and that was really important to me.

Carolina Moore:
Well, I’m not actually going to try, I’ll totally take your word on it, but it does look like, yes, it’s pretty secure. And then I love that you include a screwdriver right in there. So it’s not like I get this and I want to put my rotary blade in there, I don’t have to go searching for a screwdriver, one that actually fits in the case is included.

Heather:
Yeah. That was an addition after that. We didn’t do that at first because we didn’t know that those little screwdrivers existed, but once we found them, we were very excited to include them.

Carolina Moore:
Yay. And you continue to evolve as people wanted things and as you found things. I love that. So you start out with a Blade Saver Thread Cutter. Was it like a hit right away, everyone loved it, or did it take a little while for it to work its way through?

Heather:
As people saw it, they loved it, but it always takes a long time for people, for the word to get out, and I wanted it to spread through word of mouth. We don’t advertise, and so it means a lot more to me when people say that they have this or their friend told them about it. My main goal is to help people and make sewing and quilting more fun and enjoyable and take away some of the frustrations. So quite honestly, most of my tools were created because I was frustrated about something. I’d be sewing and say, “There’s got to be a better way to do this.” There were many classes I took where I said, “Man, I don’t like this. There’s got to be a better way.
Jelly roll rugs, for example, I took a class to do a jelly roll rug, and the directions were great, but just all the folding and pinning and I just, “Okay, this is just crazy. There’s got to be a better way.” So I created a little clamp that goes on your sewing table and it takes in the batting and the fabric and does the double fold at the same time. So you just pull it a little bit, make sure that it’s straight and stitch it, pull a little stitch instead of having to have to fold it all and clamp it all and then un-clamp it all as you’re sewing.

Carolina Moore:
So was that the next notion? So that’s the Jelly Roll Rug Binding Tool and Five Eighth Inch Binding Maker, right?

Heather:
Right. Actually, the second tool was the Magnetic Pin Cup. And the reason that came about is because I was in an open sew class where everybody can, at our local quilt shop, you sign up and sew whatever you want to work on. The woman sitting next to me had one of the other styles of magnetic pin holders where the pins are all on their side, but she had too many pins, so a lot of them were standing up and every time she reached for a pin, she’d say, “Ouch. Ouch.”

Carolina Moore:
No.

Heather:
Every time. This was a five-hour class. And so I sat there and was like, “Okay, there’s got to be a better way.” And so I made this Magnetic Pin Cup where the magnet, it kind of looks like an ice cream cone, and the magnet is at the bottom of the ice cream cone. So all the pin, the sharp parts are down, and so then when you reach in, you get the safe part, you use your pin, you put it back sharp part down.

Carolina Moore:
And then it has a screw top on top to keep everything secure so you can throw it in your bag and not worry about your pins going everywhere.

Heather:
Exactly. And when you open it up, the pins pop out kind of like a flower unfurling so that you can reach the pins better. So they’re not exactly straight up and down, they’re kind of relaxed and you can grab them easier.

Carolina Moore:
That’s so cool.

Heather:
But the lid was important so that you can throw it in your bag and go.

Carolina Moore:
And I love the story of how it came about. Now, did you ever find that woman again and get her one of those pin cups so she could stop saying ouch all the time?

Heather:
I absolutely would, but I never saw her again. I can’t believe it.

Carolina Moore:
One day.

Heather:
Most of the people that go were regulars, but she was a one-timer. It was a bummer.

Carolina Moore:
Well, I hope that she found it because-

Heather:
I hope so.

Carolina Moore:
… just like the rest of us, she needed that in her life.

Heather:
Yeah. Then I think the next thing we did was the Third Hand Binding Folder, and that came about because when you’re going to bind your quilt, you have hundreds of inches of binding that you need to fold in half evenly. Fold it in half and iron it. And I was always burning my fingers. So I made this little holder, this little clamp that goes on your ironing board. It’s exactly two and a half inches, and it folds your binding in half, and so you just pull it through and you can hold your iron with one hand and then just slowly pull the fabric through and it’s perfectly folded in half, and you just end up with this perfectly folded binding. And after that, I’d said, “Okay, now I’ve got all this binding. What do I do with it?” So then I created a Binding Wheel to roll all the binding on it, so it’s like a gigantic bobbin where you put all of your binding on it. It looks like a Ferris wheel.

Carolina Moore:
Yeah, I was going to say that one really does look like a Ferris wheel to me.

Heather:
Yeah, you put all your binding on there and so you can have extra, I don’t know about the rest of you, but I always seem to over make binding. And so I have lots of little Binding Wheels with some binding on them, just like I have lots of bobbins with some bobbin thread on them.

Carolina Moore:
So you can unspool a binding right off of this Binding Wheel as well really easily, instead of having that pool of binding that sits by your feet with all the pins that have dropped and lint and [inaudible].

Heather:
Yes. So you spool all the binding onto the wheel, and then you set it next to your sewing machine as you’re sewing your binding on, and it just comes right off neatly so it doesn’t have to drag on the floor. Yeah.

Carolina Moore:
So clever.

Heather:
And then people asked me for a clamp for the Binding Wheel. So we have a clamp to hold the Binding Wheel on the side of your ironing board so that you can sort of pull it faster and one-handed wheel it. And with the third hand, it started out with two and a half inches because that’s what I always used for my binding. But customers wrote to me and said, “I would like two and a quarter inches,” and said, “Yeah, I can do that.” So I made a two and a quarter inch version. Then someone else said, “You know what? I’m making this really giant blanket and I want to do a super wide binding. Would you do one that’s four inches?” “Sure.” So we have I think 11 sizes now from one and one eighth, all the way up to four inches and lots and lots of sizes in between. And if anybody wants a size we don’t have, we’re happy to make it. That’s one of the beauties of 3D printing, and because I do all the designs myself, I can make changes so that it can meet customer’s needs.

Carolina Moore:
11 different sizes. I didn’t know that you would need 11 different sizes of binding, that’s incredible.

Heather:
I didn’t either, but that’s why it’s wonderful to customers say, “I need this,” and I say, “Sure, I can do it.” So I would never have made that many, I never would’ve thought you would need that many.

Carolina Moore:
Sure. Okay. So you solved rotary blades and solved poking yourself with pins and saying ouch 700 times in five hours, and then you made binding easier. What’s next on this journey to just revolutionize quilting and make it easier for all of us?

Heather:
Well, I don’t know if I’m revolutionizing quilting, but another challenge I had was keeping track of my pieces when I’m making a quilt and there’s lots of different A, B, C, D, E pieces,

Carolina Moore:
Especially when they’re a half inch different in size and you get the wrong one. Yep.

Heather:
Yes. Sometimes you can’t tell them apart, or sometimes you have some that are mirror images, and so these are supposed to go on this side and these are supposed to go on the right side. So I made quilt block markers, and it’s the alphabet and numbers zero through nine, and there’s a little hole in the top of each one. So for all of your A parts, you put a pin through the A and that way they they’re all held together. And if it’s a really tall stack, I put it on my woolly mat and I just put the pin straight down and that holds all of my parts together, and that way I know which pieces go to which part of the block. And I also use them for my block of the months. So I’ll use the numbers frequently for keeping track of the block of the month blocks. So month one, month two.

Carolina Moore:
Oh, that’s so smart.

Heather:
And then sometimes when there were mirror images, I was doing a Cleopatra’s fan and I was doing it with Batik, which I thought was really smart when I was cutting it. And then when I was piecing it was not so smart because you can’t tell the top from the bottom, keeping track of which was left and which was right was difficult. So I used blue for one set and I used red for the other set, and that way I knew which parts went to which side, and that way I knew which side was up.

Carolina Moore:
Oh, that’s so smart. So not only number coded, but then you can get a couple sets of different colors and now they’re number coded and color coded or letter coded and color coded.

Heather:
Correct. Yes.

Carolina Moore:
So clever.

Heather:
I just find it helps. A lot of my products are for convenience, so I have a thing called a Phone and Notions Holder and this, I have a large Baby Lock machine and it has this wonderful space on top, the lid opens up and it has this wonderful space on top. And so I created this Phone and Notions Holder that has all of the notions that I need when I’m stitching, the seam ripper of course, and some tweezers and brushes and marking tools, but it also has a space to put my glasses and a space to hold my phone up, because I think we’re all addicted to our phone, and that way my phone is right there, but it’s out of my way.
And part of the reason that there’s a space for my glasses is I am nearsighted. So I frequently take my glasses off when I’m sewing and I set them down somewhere and I kept losing my glasses. There’s a find my phone thing with my watch, I can hit the button and my phone will make noise. And I said, “I really need that for my glasses.” My son said, “Well, why don’t you just keep your glasses with your phone?” So that’s where this Phone and Notions Holder came along with the glasses spot, so that you can just have everything all together and then I’m not losing my glasses anymore.

Carolina Moore:
That’s so smart. See, I’m nearsighted as well, but usually I wear contacts and so I need readers all the time to compensate because the contacts mean that I can see distance great, but I can’t see close up with my contacts in.

Heather:
I see.

Carolina Moore:
You can’t just take off your contacts for a minute while you’re looking at something up close.

Heather:
Right. So then you’d have a place to store your readers.

Carolina Moore:
Yeah. My solution is to just buy 12 pairs of readers and have them everywhere, but you can’t do that with prescription glasses quite as easily.

Heather:
Correct. Some of the other notions that I have been working on, again, it’s always, I don’t want to say need-based, but opportunity-based, I’ve been doing a lot of hand sewing. I’ve been doing cross stitch, so I created a little stitch finder. It looks like a picture frame, but it’s magnetic and it goes on your chart so that you can keep track of the little space. It shows your focus of this is where I’m stitching, because I get lost in a chart without something to hold my place. And then of course, I needed a place to put my needle, so I made needle minders. And one of the things that’s really fun about 3D printing is I can actually create things that cannot be manufactured in the traditional manufacturing sense. So my needle minders are also fidget spinners. There’s a mini logo in there with a ring around it, and the logo, actually, if you pinch the logo, the outside rings spin.
And another thing I did with my needle minders is it’s actually two needle minders sandwiched together. So you can use it as a magnetic pin, so you can use it with English paper piecing, you can use it to hold anything together. I actually have one customer who splits them in half and puts them on her wall because she has a magnetic bookshelf next to where she sews, and so she uses it to hold up her scissors, her small snips. So she uses it as a snips holder instead of just a needle holder.

Carolina Moore:
Oh, clever.

Heather:
And then I also, because I was doing cross stitch, I needed a place for all of my cross stitch floss and a place for my little scissors. So I created a little, I call it a hand sewing companion because it can be used for English paper piecing or cross stitch, and the little cross stitch bobbin, the little cards where you put your cross stitch floss fit inside of these, you can fit 10 of them in these boxes and it’s all magnetic. I love my magnets.
And there’s a little scissor box where there’s a hole where your scissors actually just go in the side of this box, so they’re protected. It’s like a giant scissor cover, but it’s magnetic, so you can just slide the scissors out and there’s a lid that holds pins, so you’ve got all the pins that you need. You’ve got a little spot to either hold a thimble or I use mine to put my little snipped threads because when you’re doing hand sewing, you always end up snipping that few inches of extra thread and never know where to put them. So now there’s a little place to put them. And so I’ve got my little grab and go things when I sit in doctor’s offices in waiting rooms, I’ve got all my little notions with me.

Carolina Moore:
It’s so clever the way you’ve built the little compartments in there as well. So they’re almost like stacked compartments inside each other to fit all the things.

Heather:
I was trying to make everything as compact as possible.

Carolina Moore:
You definitely have an engineer’s brain, and we love that when we have these engineer brains creating quilty notions for us.

Heather:
One notion that I never ever would’ve made, but customers begged me, is the ruler stands, quilt ruler stands. So I didn’t want it to be just like everybody else’s quilt ruler stands because when I promised I would make some, I looked at my quilt rulers and said, “You know what? I have a lot of curved quilt rulers,” and when they stack them into a traditional stand, they roll all over the place. So my quilt ruler stands, you have a choice, you can have flat because there are a lot of flat rulers, but there are also a lot of curved rulers. So you can choose the curved version, which has a slight curve in the bottom, so that way you can carry your quilt ruler stand full of quilt rulers, and they’re not going to roll all over the place because they’re cupped in the ruler stand. That’s another thing that nobody else has done or I haven’t seen manufactured that way. It would be very difficult to do that in wood.

Carolina Moore:
Absolutely. And again, it’s one of those, you’re a quilter, this is an actual quilty problem. It’s not just that we need a place to hold our rulers, but what kinds of rulers do we have that would need to be in a stand like this? So smart.

Heather:
Exactly. One other thing that I love about 3D printing is I can offer lots of colors. And so people can pick, instead of just one shade of blue, I think we have six shades of blue and people can choose the size that they want. And with the quilt ruler stands, do you want it to be three inches wide? Do you want it to be five inches wide? Do you want it to be 10 slots? Do you want it to be 20 slots? Do you want it to be flat? Do you want it to be curved? Do you want it to be for six milliliters, quarter inch or eight inch slots? And we build everything to order so that way everybody can have what they want.

Carolina Moore:
So how many 3D printers do you have running at any time to be able to manufacture all these things?

Heather:
We have over two dozen 3D printers.

Carolina Moore:
Oh, wow.

Heather:
Yeah, it’s called a print farm when you have that many printers.

Carolina Moore:
I love that. It’s a notion farm.

Heather:
It is. It is. It’s a notion farm. And yes, I go down and I say, “I have to go check the crop.”

Carolina Moore:
Oh, that’s so fun.

Heather:
It’s important to make it fun.

Carolina Moore:
Okay. You have a notion on your site that is called a Thread Cork.

Heather:
Oh, yes. That’s another thing that was driving me crazy. So many of these threads don’t have a place to stash the end of the thread once you’ve opened it and they get tangled and it drives me crazy. So I made these little Thread Corks and I wanted the top to be cute, so they kind of look like a tulip bud, I guess. And so yeah, Thread Corks I made to solve the messy threads sitting around my sewing room problem.

Carolina Moore:
So they have the little slots that hold the thread then?

Heather:
So the top of it looks like, kind of looks like a cork, and then underneath the part of the cork that would go in a bottle has a hole. So you can kind of picture two legs, and then you put the thread through the legs and then plug the cork into the top of your spool, in the hole where the …

Carolina Moore:
The spindle would go.

Heather:
[inaudible] and the spools.
And it pinches it, so it holds your thread in place. So that’s why I called it a Thread Cork because to me, it’s like a cork. It’s like a bottle stopper.

Carolina Moore:
That’s so clever.

Heather:
And I’m looking at my desk, I have a hanging thread catcher because when you’re sewing, you have lots of little spare threads that need to be put somewhere. So my hanging thread catcher, it looks like a crystal ball almost. It’s got texture on the outside, and there’s a little place to hang your thread snips. So your thread snips are right there, they’re out of your way, but they’re right there, but they’re not on your sewing surface to get knocked over. Because sometimes when I’m sewing, I knock, as I’m rotating what I’m working on, I knock things on the floor, so that’s partly why this came about.

Carolina Moore:
Yes. And then you have to find it and it’s rolled somewhere and you don’t know where it went. Yes.

Heather:
Yeah, it goes underneath my desk and then I find all the other … my son has a fuzzy cat and there’s tumble fur everywhere. You vacuum and five minutes later there goes another bit of tumble fur. It’s unbelievable.

Carolina Moore:
Yes. Longhaired cats.

Heather:
Yes.

Carolina Moore:
Even my short haired cat, she sheds quite a bit. Absolutely. So I think we’ve gone through, I know there’s more, and I’ll definitely have the links so that people can go find the more. I mean, this feels like so many ideas, is it possible that you have more ideas that you haven’t made yet?

Heather:
Oh, yeah. Always. There’s a lot of things. So one of the things I’m looking at right now that is on the site is called a Multi Sized Block Trimmer, that is an acrylic, it’s kind of like a puzzle piece. So instead of just having a five by five ruler and a six by six ruler, there are, I don’t remember how many pieces, but you can do hundreds of different sizes. You can go up to 15 and a half inches by 15 and a half inches square, or you can rearrange, they’re like puzzle pieces, so you can rearrange these puzzle pieces to be rectangles, and you can cut on the inside so you can fussy cut. There are slots to a fussy cut on the inside, or you can cut on the outside to do bigger blocks.
And that came about because I was doing a block of the month where they had you stitch all these pieces together and you ended up with this really wonky shaped thing and you were supposed to trim it down. It was really hard to visualize the block as it was. And so with this frame, I was able to see exactly where I was going to be cutting and what I was going to end up with, because it wasn’t just a simple cut two inches off the outside. It was a wonky shape that got cut into a square. So this tool helps you trim whatever sizes you need.

Carolina Moore:
This is so clever. It’s like build a ruler. You can build your ruler whatever size you need, your square ruler, or you could even make this a rectangle because there’s no reason that you can’t make the left and right side’s the same and then make the top and bottom a different Same.

Heather:
Yes. And I use rectangles a lot for my cross stitch designs.

Carolina Moore:
Oh, yes.

Heather:
We don’t seem to do that many rectangles in quilting, but I mean, sometimes. But I mean, you can obviously do rectangular blocks if you want. So another thing I’m looking at right here, one of my latest quests has been doing bias binding. So I have a whole suite of Bias Binding Clamps. So there’s a bunch of bias binding tape makers on the market where you have to hold it in your hand and pull it along and iron and pull and iron and pull. And it’s another one of those cases of I burn my fingers and get really upset. So I spent more than a year on these to get them just right. And I have one I’m super excited about them. And the quarter inch I’m having so much fun with right now because I’m doing bias binding Christmas lights. So just picture a swirly cable, and I’m doing that with my bias binder and then attaching little Christmas lights on it with applique.
And the thing that I’m really proud of is not only can you easily make your bias binding with this tool because you clamp it on the side, it’s very much like the third hand. You clamp it on the side of your iron, you put the fabric through, you hold the iron down, and you slowly pull the fabric. So you only need two hands, you don’t need three hands. And after you have it folded, after both sides are folded in, you put it through the tool again, and there’s a slot where you can attach the fusible tape. So you can make your own fusible bias binding by attaching the tape, that way you can get the exact color that you want and the exact quality of material that you want.

Carolina Moore:
So for people who have never played with bias binding before, because there’s plenty of quilters who are new to quilting and have made a couple quilts, the really great thing … people talk about bias generally in quilting like it’s a negative because if you have bias in when you’re piecing things, then the pieces can stretch and get wonky, and we don’t want that. But when we’re doing things like attaching a binding, a bias binding has stretch because you haven’t cut it on the grain of the fabric, you’ve cut it across all the grains and so that’s why it stretches. And you can do it around curves, so if you’re curving, instead of doing square corners on quilts, you can curve the corners on quilts. But it’s also great for this fusible bias applique, where you take this bias and you can basically write cursive with it and fuse it on there.

Heather:
Yes. And the key is you don’t actually have to use bias, it’s called a bias binding tool because that’s sort of the industry standard for when you take the two edges of the fabric and fold them in over themselves so that the raw edges are hidden. I like to do a lot of Lori Holt’s applique designs, and she frequently has you using a bias binding tool, but you use straight of grain because you’re doing little chicken legs, and so you’re doing straights. But trying to fold the fabric over so you end up with a quarter inch without raw edges and without burning your fingers is nearly a miracle.
So it was actually, to be honest, it was Lori Holt’s quilt-alongs that got me wanting to make this bias binding tool. But then I also had quilters write to me, because they’re doing quilt as you go, and they wanted really wide ones because they wanted to do, you can use the same theory of you take a wide strip of fabric, fold both edges in, and then you have two clean edges of a fabric strip that you can use to cover up where you join your quilted blocks. So imagine you quilted a block and it’s beautiful, and you quilt another block, and then you sew those two together. You use this binding strip to cover up the raw edges of your quilting.

Carolina Moore:
For your quilt as you go projects.

Heather:
Yes. So I have these bias binding tools. They go from quarter inch, all the way up to someone asked me for four inches to go down to two inches.

Carolina Moore:
Oh, wow. So almost like a sashing?

Heather:
Yes.

Carolina Moore:
Yep. That’s so clever.

Heather:
So a lot of the tools come about because I wanted to do something and some of the others come about because people asked for them.

Carolina Moore:
So you take requests, people can email you, and if there’s a surge of demand, then it might become a thing?

Heather:
Well, I am happy to get emails from people, and it doesn’t require a surge of things. Honestly, I have done quite a few private projects. There’s a woman who makes special kits for women that have had mastectomies, and there’s a special bag that you need to wear to hold everything in place because you have drainage tubes, and these special bags required many hours for her to stitch, and she had very specific dimensions that she needed. So I made a special tool for her. And there was someone else that had a similar medical need project that she is making things to donate, and so I am happy to make tools like that to help people that are helping others. And a lot of these tools save thousands of hours for people that are donating, which means they’re able to be more productive and help more people. So that just makes me very happy to be able to contribute.

Carolina Moore:
That’s incredible. Now, do you ever go to shows and events so people can meet you in person?

Heather:
I love to go to shows and events, but I go as an attendee. I do not go as a vendor. I was just at the Long Beach Quilt Festival and had a wonderful time learning how to do all kinds of wonderful fabric dying. And if I were to have a booth, then I wouldn’t be able to take all these classes, and this is where I get my inspiration.

Carolina Moore:
I was at Long Beach too.

Heather:
I love meeting people, but I’m not a salesperson. Sorry.

Carolina Moore:
Oh no, you don’t need to apologize for that. I mean, I think that great notions sell themselves. And just showing people, okay, this is what it does, and then letting their mind run wild and “Oh, so that means I can do this with it and I can do that with it and it’ll solve this problem?” Yes, it will. Yeah, I was at Long Beach, but also just as an attendee walking around, because the year before I was a vendor there and I didn’t see the show at all. We were allowed to come in early to set up and see the show, but I was so exhausted from 3 days that I never walked the show. I never saw the quilts last year.

Heather:
I’m sure. I got the most beautiful thimble at the Long Beach Show. There’s a woman that, she’s an artisan and she makes beautiful, beautiful thimble jewelry. So yeah, I was very happy to be able to walk the floor and find wonderful finds like that. So I have a new treasure thimble that I never would’ve had if I had been working.

Carolina Moore:
Yes, I spent a fair amount of money at the Long Beach Show as well. It’s really easy to do when you see all the fun things. So you’re working on new projects. How do you decide what’s going to be next in the queue? What’s going to be your next invention?

Heather:
Honestly, it’s whatever is really fun and whatever needs to be fixed. So either it’s something I’m really excited about or something I’m really frustrated about. Is it something that’s driving me crazy, there should be a better way, or is it something that, wow, there’s this new idea? So with the fabric dying classes I took, I did get a lot of ideas for possibilities, but possibilities don’t always turn into products. We’ll see what happens.

Carolina Moore:
Sure. Well, we look forward to seeing those. Anything else you want to add before we go?

Heather:
Just I think quilters are the best people. They have the biggest hearts. They have wonderful ideas. They’re so caring, and I love being a part of this community. I love joining quilters and sewing along with people, and it’s just wonderful. And I encourage people to keep helping each other. And if there’s anything that I can do to help, I am always happy to listen and see if there’s some way that I can help solve someone else’s problem. And it does not have to mean money for me, I do this because I genuinely want to make the quilting world a better place and help make people happy.

Carolina Moore:
I love that. Okay. Where can people find you online so they can see when you come out with your next products and also see all these things? And I’ll make sure that all these links get added into the show notes as well.

Heather:
Our website is purplehobbies.com.

Carolina Moore:
And then on any social media?

Heather:
I’m not really a social media person. I have an Instagram account, but honestly, I don’t really use it. So the website is where we put things, and more often than not, I’m at my local quilt shop sewing with the ladies.

Carolina Moore:
I love that. Well, thanks so much for joining me today. It was such a pleasure having you.

Heather:
Thank you so much. I really enjoyed talking with you

Carolina Moore:
Friends, that’s our episode for today. I hope you loved it as much as I loved having this conversation. Remember that you can find all the details that we talked about in the show notes, and those are all at ilovenotions.com. And make sure to leave this podcast a review in your favorite podcasting app. Leaving a review will let people know that maybe they should listen as well, and it will help the podcast algorithm show this podcast to other people who love notions just as much as we do. Friends, that’s all I have for you today, but I will see you right here real soon. Bye for now.

The post Heather Snow – Purple Hobbies appeared first on i love notions.

With a focus on practical and useful projects, Annie’s patterns appeal to sewists of all ages and levels and serve as a great base for classes. Annie is the creator of ByAnnie’s Soft and Stable, an innovative product she designed to add body, stability, and a professional finish to purses, bags, home dec items, and more.

A popular Bluprint/Craftsy instructor and BERNINA Ambassador, Annie has a broad range of information to share from using the proper supplies and equipment to easy techniques that give professional results.

Show Notes:

By Annie Website
NEW: Double-sided Basting Tape
By Annie on YouTube
Patterns By Annie on Instagram

Listen to the Episode Here:

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Transcript of the interview with Annie Unrein:

Carolina Moore:
I love notions, and I’m guessing that you do too. Hey there, friend. It’s Carolina Moore, your favorite sewing and quilting YouTuber, and now podcaster here with another episode.
So I’m sitting here at the h+h show with Annie, the Annie of ByAnnie, who makes all of our favorite bag making products. I’m so excited to sit down with you. Usually when I see you at shows, I’ll walk by your booth and you’re always having a conversation with someone. And I don’t ever want to interrupt because you’re always in these great conversations. So that I get you to myself for just these few minutes is so fun. But introduce yourself. Tell us a little about you and where you got started.

Annie Unrein:
All right. Thank you for inviting me to be part of your podcast. I’m really excited to talk to everybody and tell you a little bit more about ByAnnie. So I actually started as a quilter. My kids had grown, they were off to college. I’d moved to a new town. We’d had an inn in Alaska. And-

Carolina Moore:
Wait, you owned an inn in Alaska?

Annie Unrein:
We did. We actually homesteaded 160 acres in Alaska.

Carolina Moore:
Oh, wow.

Annie Unrein:
The requirement that we had, to clear and put into production half of the ground within five years, and we quickly realized that making a living farming in Southeast Alaska, there was no hope of it, that we had to figure out a way to do it. So we actually petitioned the state from whom we’d gotten the land for permission to do an inn so that we could sell the produce we produced or we could use the produce we produced in our garden. And they agreed, because otherwise we wouldn’t have been able to do anything.
We’d done that for 10 years, 15 years, and so much of my life had been measured by what I got done in a day. And all of a sudden we’d sold that business and I wasn’t working and I had nothing to do. I actually went into a little bit of a funk. I spent probably two months hanging in a hammock and reading books and looking at the sky and thinking, “Now what am I going to do?” And I found the local quilt guild and joined the guild and made amazing friends that will be my friends for life, and just fell in love with quilting. I’d always done handicrafts and sewing and things like that, but quilting was my thing.
I’d done that for a while. I was doing scrapbooking and I wanted a way to pay for my quilting habit without taking money out of the family budget. My husband, I did all the bookkeeping, he never would’ve known what I was spending. I wanted it to be my money that I was spending, so I didn’t have to account for it at all. So I thought “If I wrote a pattern, I could probably sell a few patterns and buy a few yards of fabric.” And at the time I was doing scrapbooking, having workshops and things in my home. And one of my customers, her brother was the publisher of Memory Makers magazine.

Carolina Moore:
Oh, it’s who you know sometimes.

Annie Unrein:
Sometimes, yep. And she came to one of my workshops and I had made this organizer to go on the back of a door that was just canvas and it had all kinds of vinyl pockets, but I’d sized them to fit rulers and stickers and paper and scissors and all the things that you needed. And she said, “That is such a good idea.” She said, “Would you mind, we’re getting ready to do a spring-cleaning [inaudible].” And she said, “Would you mind if I took a picture of that to put in the magazine?” And I said, “No, not at all.” Go ahead. And I knew that if I found this useful, other consultants would find this useful too. So I said, “Why don’t you put in that I have a pattern,” which I didn’t yet, but I knew I could.

Carolina Moore:
By the time the magazine would come out, because that usually takes a couple months, you could have a pattern-

Annie Unrein:
Yeah, several months actually. I could. So she said, “Okay, how much is it?” And I said, “$10.” And she said, “Okay.” So she put it in. It actually took several months and not long after we talked, my youngest sister’ husband found out that he had cancer, and he died within just a few months. And she had two little girls. She was just devastated. And so I was spending a lot of time in Colorado with her trying to get things in order and take care of things. And one day my husband called and he said, “I don’t know what you’ve done, but you are getting all kinds of mail with $10 checks.” And I thought for a minute, I was like, “Oh yeah, that organizer pattern.” I said “Oh, okay. Well, it’s this pattern that I’m going to write.”
And fortunately, I was headed home not long after that. An email existed in those days. And so I was able to email everybody and explain the situation, and everybody was very understanding and I got to work right away. So within probably two or three weeks, I had the pattern done and I was able to send it to people, but it was so nice to get a $10 check in the mail and know I could go buy another yard of fabric to add to my stuff. And so I got hooked at that point.
About that time also, I had volunteered to be in charge of our guild’s retreat, and another member of the guild, Heather Purcell, who with her husband had started Superior Threads, volunteered to help me. So Heather and I were spending a lot of time together doing this. I was working on a couple of quilt patterns, and she said, “If you make one for me, I’ll take it and hang it in my booth and sell your patterns.” So she gave me a real good little leg up.
And so it wasn’t long before I had three patterns ready to go. And I took a class at the college, learned how to write HTML code, made me a website, started byannie.com with all of three patterns and checks were coming in fairly steadily or payments through PayPal. However I did it, I don’t even remember at this point. And then Bob and Heather had a product called Charlotte’s Fusible Web, which I think they still have. It’s a fusible thread. So I wrote patterns for that. They invited me to go to… Well, I actually invited myself to go to Houston. They were doing demos of the fusible thread, and Heather said, “I think we’re going to do this. What do you think?” And I said, “It’d be awesome, like magic people will really enjoy it.”
So Fusible Thread is made with many, many filaments of nylon thread and nylon melts when you hit it with an iron. So you put it in your bobbin, you trace your design onto your fabric, you stitch around the line you trace. So say you want to do a heart, you trace your heart, you stitch around it, and then you cut just as close as you can to that line of stitching, and you put it down on the piece of fabric that you want to fuse it to. You hit it with your iron, and that bottom thread melts fussing it, and your top thread comes out. But your design is fused in place only around the outside stitching edges.

Carolina Moore:
So it’s the very finest, finest, finest line of glue.

Annie Unrein:
Yes. Yeah, it’s just a really thin line of glue. So you don’t have that stiff flat look that you get with Wonder-Under where everything’s fused together. If you’ve put it on something that maybe is patchwork, it has seams, you can cut that out. When you go to do… I usually would do a blanket stitch or a satin stitch to finish the edges off, it’s not shifting and sliding. You don’t get to the end and have a pucker because your layers didn’t move easily. So really cool.
But anyway, she said, “I think that’s what we’re going to do for our demos.” And I said, “That’s fabulous. It’s magic. People will love it.” But I said, “You really need to take me because you’ve never even used it.” And she looked at me really funny, and I thought, “Uh-oh, I’ve really overstepped my bounds here.” But the next day she called me and she said, “I thought about it, and you’re right, I need to take you.” And she said, “I’d like you to do market and festival with us.” And she said-

Carolina Moore:
Oh, wow, you jumped in with both feet.

Annie Unrein:
And she said, “We’ll pay you.” And I said, “Oh, no, you don’t need to pay me. Just getting to go.” And she said, “No, you’re going to work really hard.”

Carolina Moore:
Yes, you are.

Annie Unrein:
And oh my gosh, I had no idea. I’d never done anything like that before. But I worked really hard. But it worked well. I had a great time, and I ended up probably doing 20 or 30 shows a year with them for quite a while.

Carolina Moore:
That’s like two a month. That’s a lot.

Annie Unrein:
It was a lot. I was on the road all the time. We were all over. We went to Hawaii, we went everywhere, but we had a great time.
So all this time, I’m writing a few patterns here and there, and they’re letting me take my patterns and display them in my booth, in their booth. So I was exposed to a huge audience that I never would’ve been done before.
Then we were at a show and somebody came through and they had this fabric that was all crinkly and textured and showed it to Heather, and it was a new product. She came and showed it to me and she said, “What do you think of this?” So what it was was a polyester fabric that when you steamed it it shrunk 20% in each direction. So if you sewed it to another piece of fabric that wouldn’t shrink, when it shrunk, the fabric that you sewed it to would create texture. And she said, “What do you think of this?” And I said, “Oh, I think we could have fun playing with that. And she said, “In order for it to be a viable product, we have to have patterns to go with it. Would you write patterns for it?” And I said, “Sure, I can do that.”
That was October. And in February, we were having our first School of Threadology with Superior Thread. So we had store owners coming from all around the country to learn about using Superior Threads. And we thought, “That would make a fun project to do.” So between October and February, we had to figure out how to use it, what to call it, how to market it, write some patterns for it. So I was super busy, but when we came out, we had it, people loved it.

Carolina Moore:
I remember when that came out.

Annie Unrein:
Do you?

Carolina Moore:
Yeah.

Annie Unrein:
So I named it. I basically did everything. It was kind of my baby, but their product. We came actually to this exact convention center here in Rosemont. That was our first show that we did with it. And we were the bells of the ball. We had people lined up at our booth at 7:30. Before the show opened, all the vendors were there wanting to find out about it. And I demoed all day until half an hour after the show was over because everyone was so excited.

Carolina Moore:
It created the kind of texture that you used to have to do by hand, like hand work. And it was just a couple lines on the sewing machine and then hitting it with a steam iron.

Annie Unrein:
Yes. And depending on the stitch you did, the fabric you used, how close you were, how far apart, you got really different looks. And it was so simple and easy to do, and it was permanent and it was even. So I had done texture by pushing things through the hole in the cooling pad, one of those, all the little gridded holes and then fusing, interfacing on the back.

Carolina Moore:
Oh, like a trivet?

Annie Unrein:
Yeah.

Carolina Moore:
Okay. Yes.

Annie Unrein:
Something like that. There were so many ways you could do it, but this was super simple and easy and it didn’t wash out and you could cut your piece out and it wasn’t stretchy and loose. It was a flat piece of fabric when you were done. So it was really fun. But we sold everything we took for the show the first day, and we told people “We’re going to ship some more in, it’ll be here like 10 o’clock in the morning.” We were staying at a hotel across the street, and Todd, their son, went over to the hotel to pick up this big box. He came in the door and there were women waiting at the door reaching their hands in the box trying to get the stuff. It was just absolutely insane. I felt I knew what a movie star who was being hit by the paparazzi.
So I became known as the texture magic lady for a long time. But making that product really made me realize what goes into developing a product. And all along, I had been making patterns for purses and things and using a product in them to help them stand up. But it wasn’t a product I could buy at a price that I could sell it to stores. And so I thought, based on this, it’s like, “Okay, I am going to develop a product that I can use in purses and bags and buy it at a price that I can afford to sell it to distributors so it can be distributed worldwide.” So I worked about two years and developed what became Soft and Stable. And it kind of revolutionized bag-making because you didn’t-

Carolina Moore:
It absolutely did, not kind of. It really did.

Annie Unrein:
You didn’t have to put five layers of batting and some kind of stiffeners that would get all wrinkly after you turned them right side out. You could do one layer of this. It was simple and easy to do. And that turned… Actually, texture magic turned me from a hobby to a business because all of the distributors picked up my patterns at that point. But Soft and Stable really took it up to the next level. So Soft and Stable I think was my first big new product. And then I did… I can’t remember whether I did zippers first or that, but then we did our line of handbag, zippers, and then we’ve just grown from there to add…
Our goal, because lived in Alaska for 20 years, and this was before the internet existed, and I knew how hard it was to get things. We lived in a tiny community of a hundred people that was on the mainland, but not accessible for anywhere. You could only fly there. We got one barge in a year. So you ordered groceries for a year. The first three years we were there, we had no electricity. So we ate canned food that we ordered on that barge for a year.
And so if I needed sewing supplies, we got them when we went for a trip. I still have laces that I bought back in those days because you stocked up, you didn’t know how much you’d need, and-

Carolina Moore:
You really needed a stash.

Annie Unrein:
You needed a stash. But I knew how hard it was if you wanted to make something and you couldn’t get that stuff. So I thought “If I’m going to call for it in my pattern, I want to make sure that it’s something we have available other than fabric, because there’s no way I could do all the fabrics that somebody wanted.” Our goal basically was anything you need to make your project other than fabric you can find from us and stores can find from us.
So I did that for a long time. I had a couple of employees about 10 years ago. My husband wasn’t very involved in the business, but he liked to cook and he loved to grocery shop. So he took all that over and he did all the running around, picking up the stuff. Soft and Stable comes to us in a truck, and we have independent contractors who cut it and package it for us. So he would deliver that to the cutters and pick it up. And all of a sudden he was gone. Did I say my husband died? That’s where I was headed with that.

Carolina Moore:
That’s okay.

Annie Unrein:
My husband died about 10 years ago, very unexpectedly, had a heart attack, not that unexpectedly. He told me since the day we met in high school that he was going to die at 40 because his grandpa, his dad, everybody, all the men in his life had died of heart attacks fairly young-

Carolina Moore:
But we don’t ever truly believe that.

Annie Unrein:
No, not at all. And he actually made it to 60, so he made it 20 extra years. But he lived his life like he was going to die at 40. So a week or two before he died, he told me, “I don’t know what I’m going to do with the rest of my life. I’ve done everything I wanted to do. I’m happy with what I’ve done and what am I going to do now?”
But it was a huge adjustment to have that happen. And I was all of a sudden responsible for all of these things that he had done, and I was struggling to get everything done. And my son had gone to Spain. He’d gotten his MBA there. He had actually had met a gal in Peru when he was working there for a while. They had fallen in love. They had come to the US basically just for her to come visit and meet us, and found out when it was time for her to leave that trying to get a visa and stuff would be hard, that the best solution was to get married because then she could stay.
So they got married and a month later my husband died. But Casey was working as chief of staff to the president of the university in Spain, [inaudible] California. And Glo really wasn’t doing much of anything. So I took a sewing machine out and some fabric and taught her how to sew. And so she started sewing. So a month or two later, I called and I said, “So how are you liking your job by now?” And he said, “I’m not really loving it. I’m not doing what I got my MBA for. I’d really like to go somewhere where I can grow a small business.” And I said-

Carolina Moore:
Guess what?

Annie Unrein:
“I have a small business you can grow.” And I said, “I’ll match your salary. I’d rather pay you than give it to the IRS. And Glo can have a job. She likes to sow. She can do whatever. I want to turn over all the day-to-day stuff to you. All I want to do is write patterns, film videos, and travel to teach.”
It took us about three years to get to the point where I was ready to give up all those things and let them take them over. But once I did, it’s like I never want to do those things again. And now there’s no way I could run the business without them. But he had such a great big picture vision and was so good at taking us to the next level and convincing me that you can’t do everything, you have to let these things go. Because if you try to do it all your time is limited and you will never grow.

Carolina Moore:
You only have 24 hours.

Annie Unrein:
So he was really instrumental in taking us to the next step. When he came to work with me, we were still working out of my three car garage. We moved shortly after that to a 2,500 square foot warehouse, which was full the day we moved in because I’d had stuff spread throughout my house.

Carolina Moore:
I know nothing about this.

Annie Unrein:
Everyone who works on their own knows this.
And the next year we moved into 5,000 square feet. We expanded the next year, double that. I don’t even know what our footprint is now, but we’ve taken over a whole lot more of the building we’re in. And yeah, we try to keep two or three years of stock on hand, which during COVID was just insane. We thought we had that and it was gone in three months. And then it was, how do you get it here? Because things aren’t running. So it’s been a crazy few years, but hopefully things are mellowing out in that department-

Carolina Moore:
Hopefully.

Annie Unrein:
And getting back in order. But that’s kind of how I got from writing patterns to pay for my quilting habit to not having any time to quilt anymore.

Carolina Moore:
That’s one of the things that I find when I talk to different quilty business owners that we had this hobby and we thought, “Oh, I could make a little money on the side doing this.” And then there comes this point where you make a decision of, “Okay, am I going to go all in on this? And it’s no longer my hobby, it is my business and it’s responsible for paying for things in the household, or am I going to keep this a hobby because I don’t want deadlines attached to my fun.”

Annie Unrein:
Yes. And it really does change. For me, it’s still fun. And when people say, “Are you thinking about retiring?” It’s like I would be doing exactly the same thing if I was retired. Maybe not with quite the same deadlines, but for me, the big thing that changed was having additional employees and knowing that I am responsible for supporting this family and that family and that family and that family, that puts a whole different spiel on it. It makes it much more important that I maintain new patterns so that the business keeps growing so that I can afford to pay for everybody’s salaries [inaudible].

Carolina Moore:
I find for a lot of people, especially women that failing ourselves is… We can usually live with that, but failing other people is that’s a burden we can’t bear. And so it just makes you work that much harder.

Annie Unrein:
Yeah, no, fortunately I have lots of good helpers.

Carolina Moore:
So you’ve come out with some new products lately as well. I’ve heard great things about the basting tape that you have.

Annie Unrein:
Yes. People have really loved our basting tape. So we had a basting tape that we used for a long time that we really loved. It was an eighth-inch wide. I liked the really narrow basting tape. And then the company just disappeared. I didn’t want a wide basting tape, and I wanted something that was really sticky that would hold in place, and we just couldn’t find anything else to replace it. So we work with a really great company who does almost everything that we need. They do our zippers, they do our mesh, our fold over elastics, all of that. And we said, “Okay, we need a basting tape.” And they sent us rolls and rolls of basting tape to try. Some that were ironed on, some that… Just everything under the sun.
And we tested and tried and finally found the one that was the stickiest, that the paper came off the easiest, that was the right width, and got that made. But it’s perfect if you… For instance, a lot of times we are putting handles on a bag, and you’ve got two or three layers of quilted fabric. You’ve got your fabric that goes over your strapping, you’ve got your strapping in there. It’s really hard to put a pin in, but we’re working with vinyl, and you don’t want to put a pin in because it will leave holes. The basting tape, just one little strip of it down the middle of your strap holds it in place. It’s really easy to keep it there until you get it sewn in.
We purposely made it really narrow so that you could avoid it when you’re stitching. We put place it like if we’re doing… A lot of times on our mesh pockets, we’ll bind the upper edge of them with a two-inch strip that becomes a half inch once it’s sewn in place, and then we’ll attach that on our zipper and sew it in place. We put the basing tape right down the middle of the binding so that you can sew on either side of it so you don’t have to sew through it. It’s a little bit sticky if you sew through it so we try to avoid it. If you do happen to sew through it and it gets gummy on your needle, just use a little bit of alcohol on a cotton ball or something and clean your needle off and then it will work fine. But our goal was to make it so we didn’t have to sow through it.
But what I love about it is its stickiness. It just holds things in place super well. It’s great if you want to put a hem in or-

Carolina Moore:
For all those pants that we don’t want a hem.

Annie Unrein:
Yep. I think it would probably hold it forever. It’s so sticky.

Carolina Moore:
I worked a corporate job for years before going into quilting, and there was a gal who didn’t want to hem her pants. She would hammer her pants with a stapler and she would just staple the bottom of her pants. And that was fine.

Annie Unrein:
And probably no one ever noticed.

Carolina Moore:
No one ever noticed.

Annie Unrein:
Yeah. I’m short, so I have to hem pants all the time. I never thought of that. I’m going to remember that. That’s a great tip. Or grab my basting tape.

Carolina Moore:
Or yes, yes.

Annie Unrein:
But people like it for putting zippers in, holding them in place, doing the fold over elastic with the mesh.
The thing that I found, if you’re using it with fold over and elastic and mesh, both of those are a little bit stretchy. And that’s one of the qualities that we like about them is that they expand to hold things. Your photo over elastic isn’t stretchy.

Carolina Moore:
Oh, the basting tape isn’t stretch-

Annie Unrein:
Basing tape isn’t stretchy. Sorry. So I’ll put my basing tape on my fold over elastic. I’ll put them together, and after I have it sewn in place, I just take it and stretch it. And you can hear the basing tape breaking along-

Carolina Moore:
Snap a little bit.

Annie Unrein:
As it goes, but it served its purpose by that point. So it doesn’t matter if it’s not one continuous piece at that point. So then you’ve got your stretchy edge back again on that.

Carolina Moore:
That’s so clever.

Annie Unrein:
You figure out how to make things work.

Carolina Moore:
And I found out that y’all have treated the side especially, so that it doesn’t stick. If I’m putting it on my cutting table, it’s not going to pick up every single thread on my cutting table. It’s not going to stick to my cutting table so I have to yank to try to pull it up. So you really thought of everything.

Annie Unrein:
We tried to do that. We tried to think of… I think one thing that makes a huge difference for us is we sew every day and we make models. Every new pattern that I come up with, I sew it once when I’m thinking about how to do it, then I write the pattern, then I make it again to test what I’ve written. Then my in-house testers make it, then I send it to outside testers, then it comes back to me and I make it again based on all the input they’ve given us. And then depending on what our timeframe looks like and how busy my model maker is, I may have to make more. So we’re sewing all the time and using these products and figuring out what do you need and how does it work, and what’s the best way to do it? And making it so that it’s easy. It’s not like somebody up there in an office saying, “Oh, here’s what you need” and never using it themselves. We try it all and figure out the easiest ways to make it work.
We have a tool that we developed called Stiletto & Pressing Tool that came about too because I was sewing and finding that I needed something to hold pieces in place. So we spent probably two years developing a stiletto. It has a wooden handle on it that’s turned. So it’s really lightweight, it’s really easy to hold. We went through, I don’t know how many iterations trying to get just the right shape and size. And then we send the tips of it to a needle-making factory and they sand grind them so they’re a little bit rough. But it has a really sharp point on it. It’s a little bit rough. So when you’re working with it it doesn’t slip and slide off. You’re not sewing along and it’s constantly falling off what you’re doing.

Carolina Moore:
So it has that grip like your finger would with a fingerprint.

Annie Unrein:
Yep. And so it stays in place, but it’s in my hand constantly as I’m sewing. So usually I have like six of them that I put into my wool pin cushion next to my sewing machine because I’m sewing along and then I need to go press. It’s in my hand, I lay it down while I press. So I leave one at the ironing board. And then I need to go make a note on the pattern that this would be better worded this way. So then one’s laying at my computer. And then I go to Wonder Clip something at my work table, and there’s one laying there. So when they’re all gone, then I go gather them around the room, put them back and start again. But I really don’t think I could sew without that. It’s perfect when you’re putting in a zipper.
Our method of zipper installation is really super easy. And I think people who are afraid of zippers are always surprised at how easy it is. But our zippers that we use are handbag zippers. They’re specifically designed for purses and bags. So they have a wider zipper tape. They have extra big pulls on them. It makes them super easy to install. But we’ll take our zipper and we’ll put it right side down if we want to put it in a pocket. We let it overhang by about an eighth of an inch at the top so that… Because our next step after we sew it in is we finger press it to the lining side of the pocket, and we stitch along the very edge of the zipper tape and we hide all the raw edges of that seam underneath the zipper. But the stiletto, if you run it right along that seam, it just makes it fold. And then you’ve got it right there to push any loose threads and raw edges and things under. But it just makes all the difference.
If you’re putting binding on a project, a lot of our bags and purses, we don’t like loose linings. I don’t like a loose lining that’s all falling around in my pocket. I like my lining attached to my bag. So I usually quilt my main and lining fabric together and then cut the pieces out for my project. And then after it’s all sewn together, I use binding to cover the raw edges. And the stiletto for holding your pieces in place, making sure that all your edges are matched. And then when you go to put the binding around to the other edge, you can use that little grippy tip of it to just lift your fabric up and say, “Okay, it needs to be right here.” Hold it in place until you sew there, move your extra extra inch down. And it just makes all the difference in the world. So a lot of people have said that was a game-changer for them in terms of attaching bindings and making them look the same from one side to the other.

Carolina Moore:
I love it when it’s quilters making the tools because we know what we need because we’re using it all the time. And these are problems that we’ve bumped up against and bumped up against and thought “Someone has to have a solution for this. Wait, no one has? Now I’ll figure it out. I’ll figure out how we’re going to solve this.” And we’ve solved it for all of us, not just ourselves.

Annie Unrein:
Exactly. Yeah. Which is wonderful when people do something like that to go out and then share it with everybody.

Carolina Moore:
Yes.

Annie Unrein:
And teach them how to use it.

Carolina Moore:
Yes. Which you do such a great job of.

Annie Unrein:
Thank you.

Carolina Moore:
So you do a lot of videos as well on your bags and projects?

Annie Unrein:
We do. We have a series that we call the ByAnnie Basics, and it’s four basic patterns that we developed that teach people basically all the skills that they need to know to make our patterns. So we recommend… They’re downloadable on our website, they’re free patterns, and then we have full step-by-step out on videos that go with them. So they go through, here’s how you cut with a rotary cutter and ruler. Here’s how you quilt. Everything that you need to know to do those. And so we recommend that you start with our little Petit Four Baskets, which teach you how do you work with Soft and Stable, how when you sew through it it makes it fold how it compresses when you sew through it. So you learn all those tips making a tiny basket that uses two 10-inch squares of fabric. So it’s quick and easy to do, but you learn all the basics.
Then we have you make our Piecekeeper, which is a project bag, but you learn to quilt fabric with Soft and Stable. You learn to make your own bias binding and attach it. You learn to attach zipper to a mesh pocket, attach a border, make a simple handle. Then we have you do Call Me, which is a little bag to carry a cell phone, and you learn to work with vinyl, attach a zipper in a quilted fabric pocket, work with fold over elastic and mesh and continue quilting and doing that. And then the last project is called Easy Does It. And in that you’re working on a dimensional project. So you learn about making sure that the piece that has the curves is down against the bed of your machine. The piece that has to conform to those is up. You learn how to put a zipper in a zipper side strip and do a flat binding so you don’t have a lump when you join your pieces.
So once you’ve made those four projects, you really know everything that you need to know to make most any of our bags. So then when we do other bag patterns, we don’t have to go through all the basics. We just cover the parts that are more unique or more challenging in those projects. And we call those add-on videos. So those, when you buy at one of our patterns, you get a coupon in the pattern. So you get the add-on video free. And they’re a great way to learn to make those.
We also do a weekly Facebook Live, and we really stress education in those. So we talk about techniques, we show patterns. We have special guests come on, which is always really fun. And we really work hard to support local quilt shops. We feel like local quilt shops are our boots on the ground. There’s no way that we can teach classes in person to all the customers out there everywhere and answer every question. So we really always say, “Shop for this stuff at your local quilt shop first.” They’re teaching classes, they’re there to help you pick out the fabrics and get what you need. Yeah, so we work with that.
But we do our live every week, and we always feature local quilt shops doing that. We do a local quilt shop contest every year in February. It starts on Local Quilt Shop Day and goes through the month. This year we had 40,000 votes for over 2000 stores all around the world. We awarded grand prizes in the US, Canada, Australia, and the UK. And then we did regional prizes in all 50 states, all Canadian provinces, and every country that had winners. And all of those winners received ByAnnie Trunk Shows.
And so make sure you check that out next year in February, vote for your local quilt shops. The grand prize winners all won a prize to the show where we’re talking. And stores have told me over and over, “You made it so much fun.” What we do is when you vote, we require you to leave a comment about the store, why they’re your favorite store, and then you can also leave a story. And shop owners say they’re always so sorry when the contest is over because they love reading those comments, those positive comments. They said, “As a store owner, you don’t always get all those positive things.” And so being able to read what customers love about them just makes it all worthwhile and helps them continue going.

Carolina Moore:
You segued perfectly into what I was going to ask next, which was about the quilt shops. Because I believe the quilt shops are a national treasure and we need to protect them. And they do so much for our industry. And I agree, go check your local quilt shop first, support your local quilt shop. Because if we don’t, they won’t exist anymore. We can buy things wholesale or we can find things otherwise, but when I need something, I catch my local quilt shop just like anybody else does, and I go pick it up there. And if I can’t do that anymore, if none of us can do that anymore, it just makes our hobby that much less fun.

Annie Unrein:
Exactly.

Carolina Moore:
Plus, when you’re getting your fabric and they’re cutting it, you get to have that conversation with someone about what you’re working on and what your next project is, and they give you feedback and they give you ideas, and they have all the classes. It’s incredible.

Annie Unrein:
And if they don’t have what you need, they can get it.

Carolina Moore:
They’re almost always happy to special order.

Annie Unrein:
And they’re always happy to do that. Exactly.

Carolina Moore:
Whatever you need. Because often they’re so excited to learn about the thing as well. “Have you heard about this thing?” “Oh no. What is that?” “Oh, we’re going to get in 20 because everyone else is going to love this as well.”

Annie Unrein:
Exactly. Yep. Yeah, I have found… And more and more stores, when they started with ByAnnie stuff, they had a few, and I hear it constantly, “We’re doubling our ByAnnie space. We’re adding all your zippers. We’re doing this. We’re creating a new room. The store next to us, went out of business. We’re turning that into ByAnnie room.” And it’s fabulous. Well,

Carolina Moore:
Because bag-making is so much fun because we can’t carry our quilts around with us. Our quilts stay home, but our bags we carry. And so we are carrying these gorgeous bags and people say, “Oh, where did you get that?” “Oh, I made it.” “You made that? Oh, you’re so impressive.” “Yes, yes, I am. But you can be too.”

Annie Unrein:
Exactly. And the great thing for me, the thing I love about bags is they’re doable in hours instead of years, for me. I have so many unfinished quilts. I don’t have a single unfinished bag project because-

Carolina Moore:
This is true.

Annie Unrein:
Nothing takes more than a weekend, usually. I send my fabric to a longarm quilter, so that saves me a little bit of time. But for any of you who quilting is the part that stops you from making a bag, here’s a tip. I buy two yards of fabric. I get a main aligning, a coordinate. I send that two yard of peace to my longarm quilter because I learned that it costs me basically the same to get two yards quilted as one yard quilted. Because the work for a longarm quilter is putting it on-

Carolina Moore:
Loading it to the machine.

Annie Unrein:
Loading it on the machine. So they usually always have a minimum. It basically starts at about two yards. So I can get two yards quilted. It comes back to me, rolled it up. I have a whole wall of fabric leaning against the wall, and when it’s time to make a project, I go grab one of those and cut what I need. I have plenty of fabric left to make coordinating projects to go with it. So if I want a travel duffel bag and a travel essentials and a set of open wide and all that, I’ve got a whole set that matches. A lot of times I’ll make sure that my lining is one that would also work as a main, so I can flip it around and use that side out, which gives me a coordinated but different look.

Carolina Moore:
So while a lot of us have fabric stashed, Annie has a pre-quilted fabric stash. Yes. That’s incredible. I love that.

Annie Unrein:
It really saves a lot of time.

Carolina Moore:
I’ve had so much fun hanging out with you today. Is there anything else that you want to share before we wrap up? Because I see the show is starting and we’re about to get a lot of noise around here.

Annie Unrein:
I think we covered most everything I want to talk about. Thank you for inviting me to join you and all of you out there who are sewists, come check us out at byannie.com. We’ve got lots of videos. We’ve got a YouTube channel that’s at Patterns ByAnnie. You can follow us on Instagram and all of those @patternsbyannie and check us out.

Carolina Moore:
I’ll be adding all those links in the show notes as well. So be sure to find those show notes so you can just click right on there and find out all the great things about Annie. Anyone who knew you already has fallen more in love with you, I’m sure. And anyone who hasn’t, I hope they’ll go learn all about you now. Thank you so much for hanging out with me today.

Annie Unrein:
Thank you. It was fun.

Carolina Moore:
Friends, that’s our episode for today. I hope you loved it as much as I loved having this conversation. I love learning all these tidbits and details about our favorite notion designers and the stories behind our favorite notions. Remember that you can find all the details that we talked about in the show notes, and those are all at ilovenotions.com. And make sure to leave this podcast a review in your favorite podcasting app. Leaving it a review will let people know that maybe they should listen as well. And it will help the podcast algorithm show this podcast to other people who love notions just as much as we do. Friends, that’s all I have for you today, but I will see you right here real soon. Bye for now.

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