I began teaching for the first time in more than five years this past month.  It felt SO fantastic to teach again after so long! This was the first time I taught in my own barn, and after doing it once (thankfully with success) I plan to teach several micro retreats next year here.

Last month I taught a two-day class on layered surface design techniques including indigo and shibori, deconstructed screen printing, Gelli-plate mono printing, and Thermofax screen printing. Below are my class samples I had posted to promote the workshop:

Some student work below. (They got inventive about where the fabrics could dry.)

More work:

Gina Lee Kim had worked back into her fabric with screen printing with fig tree leaves she found at my place:

Fabrics drying on my porch, getting ready for the second round of surface work:

I limited this first class to five students, and it was a great crowd!

I made a small scrap quilt using some of my samples:

All in all, a fun time, and I am planning my next surface design retreat retreat (limited to seven students) for March 21-22, 2020. Meanwhile, there are a lot of classes being offered at Craft Napa 2020 that still have some spots! All of the Craft Napa workshops can be found here.

Hope everyone is enjoying a fantastic November!

~Pokey

Printed books eclipse ebooks for me, every time. As someone with a publishing background, I am so happy to at long last share that Crafting a Life, LLC, is publishing. Yes, publishing, as in print.

First up, a co-authored gem of a book by surface design, colorists, and quilters extraordinaire, Carol Soderlund and Melanie Testa. The content is a must-have for anyone interested in making or designing their own fabrics—or an entire collection–from scratch. It’s about combining your own pictures, sketches, drawings, ideas, or favorite color schemes with low-tech, inexpensive and readily available tools to create one-of-a-kind fabrics for quilts (art, modern, traditional) or sewing projects.

Carol and Melly also illustrate (in great detail with step-by-step photos) how to creatively use a variety of surface design techniques to achieve just the fabric you are seeking.

It’ll be full of recipes for color, techniques, and exercises, and yes it will be an e-book, too.

This book will also be manufactured in the United States, which means we wont be waiting months for a ship from overseas to deliver the content. Furthermore, I am teaming up with talented people with whom I used to work at Quilting Arts/Interweave––Larissa Davis and Larry Stein––as well as Indigo Perez, among others.

Will there be other books or printed offerings down the line? Yes. But I am going to be a bit choosy, and I am not dependent on churning out a number of books or special interest publications in a given time.

Release date will be announced shortly. For now, I just want to celebrate that I can finally share this news, to toast these two talented artists, and the team of people who are helping bring this endeavor to life!

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