In the fall of 1973, after a year in the dorm, collecting fabric, making clothes, and patching bluejeans for fellow students. She began assembling her first quilt blocks from the geometric patterns she’d imagined while reading the books in Wyoming.

My story left off when I was making the log cabin quilt that I still love.  I decided to have bright red be the primary zinger, which, by then I thought must not be too dominant in amount of coverage in order to zing the way I wanted.

It all begins with an idea.

Woodbine Medallion was the first quilt I designed on graph paper, and carefully chose and purchased fabric for.  It was inspired by Jinny Beyer’s book called “Medallion Quilts” which came out in 1982 just in time for me to be ready for and inspired by it.  A medallion quilt is a natural form for a geometric pattern, and especially for a geometric pattern on a surface.

The next few quilts that I made, that were not for babies, were inspired by a workshop at Quilting By The Lake (when it was on the Cazenovia College campus in the early 80’s) led by Terrie Mangat, and looking at her website now, I am still very inspired.

In those days in the mid-80’s, I would look in each new Quilt magazine for contests and juried shows in which to enter my work.  One such contest was put forth by a new magazine called Quilting, USA, that requested entries of landscape quilts which it planned to publish as a calendar, and there was a $1,000.00 prize.

I always enjoyed squiggle drawings as a child artist, would scribble a squiggle-drawing and color it in; squiggle a surface of interlocking lines, and color in the loops.  I decided to employ freezer-paper to implement this idea in fabric.