My fabric adventures continued with my next three collections being inspired by the photography I did for mom and I's books, Through the Garden Gate and Along the Garden Path. These books were stories of quilters and their gardens, each of the amazing quilters we featured made us a quilt for the book. While I was living in North Carolina I had decided that I would make a quilt for our book using the stitch n' flip technique. I was incredibly homesick and since I didn't have a garden of my own to be inspired from so I created my quilt based on memories of my mother's garden. This was the first quilt that I had designed, pieced and quilted on my own. I specifically remember calling my mom and asking her how I draw with my thread to finish the quilt, she never let me know that free motion quilting was not usually something that a brand new quilter would do, she just told me to go to my local quilt shop get a darning foot for my machine, drop the feed dogs and go for it. I love her for this because I never had fear when it came to machine quilting.
Not only was I growing as a quilter I was also learning a about fabric design and working with the studio. I had little confidence drawing, even though I had four years of life drawing in college, so the studio continued to do the designing of the fabric based off my combinations of photographs and color palettes. It was an interesting learning curve for me since I knew nothing about repeats and color call outs. As Along the Garden Path came out I realized that I wanted to take more of a hands on approach to fabric designing. To do this I had to quit being scared of my drawing abilities and take some chances.
These three collections really pushed me as an artist and the next series of fabric collections I created took on a whole new look.
xo
Valori
