Wondering Wednesday Week 10

Sunnyside Up & Canning Day

Happy Wednesday and welcome back to week 10 of Wondering Wednesday.

Before I get too far in to today’s question(s), I have a question for you guys.  Next Wednesday, the 15th, round 3 of Moda Blockheads kicks off.  I’m excited to share block 1 with you right here.  So my question is, would you rather I focus strictly on the Blockhead block each Wednesday and move my weekly Wondering Wednesday post to another day?  Or do a combo Blockheads/Wondering Wednesday each Wednesday?  Let me know in the comments.

So I’m starting off with the following question (we’ll see how long it takes me to answer as to how many other questions follow):

blee1977 wonders: “I’m always wondering how people get in the business, and where to go to publish your patterns in the beginning.  How do you separate yourself from the crowd that is trying to do the same thing?  How did you first get your fabric designs to someone who could, and would, actually print them?  I have so many questions about how to start getting my ideas out there…”

Canning Day Fabrics coming out February 2020

Answer:  This is probably going to be a long and meandering answer. =)

I started my blog June 4, 2009 as a way to share the quilts and quilt blocks I was making.  You can see that very first blog post here.   I started sharing the quilt tops and quilt blocks that I was making and that was mostly what I shared.

Sharing just these little tidbits on my blog led to my starting to contribute projects to books.  The first book I contributed to was Sew To Swap in 2011.

Sew to Swap Book

This quilt was my largest contribution to the book using my scrapbuster block tutorials that I had designed for a couple quilting bees that I was participating in (you can find the block tutorials here and here:

Stashbuster Quilt

2011 was also the year I had my first quilt tutorial on Moda Bake Shop, Sunny Trails:

Sunny Trails Quilt

The tutorial is available here.

This led to more tutorials on Moda Bake shop and more contributions in quilt books, including Moda’s Sweet Celebrations book.  In February 2012, I had my first quilt pattern published in American Patchwork and Quilting…you can read more about that here.

I so enjoyed making and having that first quilt in a magazine that I submitted another design to McCall’s Quilting, Triangle Toss, which was in the May/June 2012 issue (quilted by Angela Walters):

Triangle Toss–McCall’s Quilting May/June 2012

Two different fabric companies, P&B Textiles & RJR Fabrics, saw this design in McCall’s Quilting and reached out to me to see if I’d be interested in working with them to design patterns showcasing their fabrics.  I worked with both of these companies for a number of years designing quilt patterns.

In 2014, my first book came out, Playful Petals:

The fall of 2014 was when my youngest daughter started Kindergarten and I was debating whether I wanted to transition from being a stay at home mom to working outside the home.  With encouragement from some of my friends, I decided to try my hand at fabric design.  Prior to becoming involved in the quilting world, I ran a successful appliqued children’s clothing business using my hand drawn art.  Being able to utilize those skills with my love of quilting to design quilting fabric seemed like it could be a lot of fun.

Prairie Fabrics

In June of 2014, I submitted a fabric collection to Moda Fabrics.  They accepted it within two weeks, Prairie came out in 2015 and I have been designing for them since.  When Prairie released, I also launched my quilt pattern line Coriander Quilts (Corey and her quilts).  And, I now release new quilt patterns with each new fabric line.

Holliberry Fabric Collection

You just saw my newest fabric line yesterday, Holliberry.  This is my 10th fabric line and it comes out in July.

A couple tips I have:

1.  Don’t be afraid of what you don’t know.  With the resources available to us online, we can learn anything we want to.  I didn’t know how to do any of this when I started.  I didn’t start sewing until after I got married.  I didn’t know quilt math, I didn’t know how to design a quilt, I didn’t know how to write a quilt pattern, I didn’t have any experience with computer quilt programs or illustration programs.  All of those things can be learned.  You can learn through online tutorials, books, classes etc.–you just need to have the willingness to spend the time and do it.
2. Don’t expect to learn all of these things overnight.  And don’t think that you need to.  I was so fortunate to be able to build my knowledge piece by piece.  I started with figuring the math on a quilt block that I wanted to make, which led to figuring out the math on a simple quilt and then several more.  I decided Electric Quilt would be a great resource to help me design quilts…it sat in a box for probably a year until I read through the book and started going through the tutorials on how to use the program.  The first patterns I wrote up were written in Microsoft Word and the illustrations were made in Electric Quilt.  And I learned and improved as I went.
3. If you think it might be fun, give it a whirl.  I started blogging because I thought it would be fun.  I thought it would be fun to have a project in a magazine so I read the submission guidelines each magazine has online and submitted a project.  I thought having my own book would be fun so I submitted a book proposal.  Same goes for a fabric line.  The worse thing that happens is that it doesn’t get accepted.  And then you can either try again or focus in another direction…in my mind, you aren’t out a thing but time for trying something out.  And if you don’t try, you’ll never know if you might have succeeded.

So, I’m probably going to call that the only question for today!–it took a fair amount of time to answer.  I have a lot of other information on this topic that I am happy to share so if you have more questions or questions on anything I said, don’t be afraid to ask and I can answer them during a future Wondering Wednesday.  And don’t forget to weigh in on the question at the top of the page!

Have a wonderful Wednesday!