mcvl

I'm a passionate quilter with a house full of fabric. I've figured out that the only way to enrich my stash without enlarging it is to swap.

I'm writing a book (very slowly) about the design of geometric repeat quilts. My assistant, Scot, and I make small quilts to demonstrate all the different tactics available for making quilts more interesting. Our motto is "Never make another boring quilt."

What to do with so many small quilts? They're too small for a regular child's quilt, so we're donating them to the preemie ward at a local children's hospital.

Loyal fans of Joan Ford's ScrapTherapy books, we use our Accuquilt to cut our scraps into 2", 3.5", and 5" sizes. Then we have scraps of scraps; those we use to make Victoria Findlay Wolfe's Made Fabric. And then we send the scraps of scraps of scraps plus all our stray threads to a papermaker in Missouri, who turns them into wonderful imaginative paper. Nothing goes to waste.

We love almost every kind of fabric, especially Kaffe Fassett, Brandon Mably, and Philip Jacobs, Amy Butler and Parson Gray, Malka Dubrawsky, Marcia Derse, and Lotta Jansdotter, but also Barbara Brackman's wonderful reproductions, 1930s feedsack prints and Denyse Schmidt's modern variants, batiks of all kinds, zebra stripes, Liberty, Kathy Doughty's wonderful Wandering Mind collection, damascene and baronial cottons, mill book cottons, Provençal prints, M&S Aboriginals, the great Jay McCarroll for Free Spirit, Dutch wax African prints, Japanese cotton both traditional and novel, ordinary sweet little florals, leaves, and vines, and every stripe and plaid that ever lived. We scour eBay and etsy for interesting vintage fabrics, and we're good customers at Spoonflower.

What /don't/ we like? Flannel. Commercial images and movie tie-ins. Solids. Laurel Burch. Christmas, Halloween, Easter, Hanukkah, Passover, and Kwanzaa fabric. Fabric with words that are meant to be read (as opposed to words that are there just for texture). Hearts and Valentines.

As you might imagine, we like all colors, the primaries, secondaries, and tertiaries, the bright, the murky, the sophisticated, the naïve. We have a special fondness for fabrics whose color you just can't name, they include too many colors.