In this new showcase I’m featuring four Modern Quilters that you will love!
Danielle Coronado
My name is Danielle Coronado and I am the designer behind Coronado Quilt Co. My interest in textile art and design began as a child. Growing up I spent a lot of time watching my mom create just about everything with her hands. If it involved textiles, she knew how to do it. I was always so intrigued by her work with textiles. When I was about 5, she gave me my first needle and thread (with very close supervision) and I have been sewing ever since!
Until a few years ago I almost exclusively sewed garments. When my daughter was born I quit my job as a teacher to stay home with her. I began sewing again and found a lot of joy designing my own baby quilts and quilted changing pads. Since then, I have shifted from making quilted goods into designing quilt patterns for fellow quilters. I have found that it is a perfect combination of my two passions of teaching and the arts.
I consider my quilt design style to be modern-traditional. I am very inspired by traditional quilt blocks and love to find new ways to use them. I also find inspiration in the places I have explored, which influence my deep/muted color choices and overall design. I aspire to create patterns that will inspire a new generation of quilters, while also appealing to those who have been quilting for decades.
Shin-hee Chin
I was born in Montreal and started sewing table linens and duvet covers as a teenager, mostly because I couldn’t find what I wanted in shops. While I loved all things textile, I loved school too and completed a B.A. and M.A. in Linguistics and a Ph.D. in Cognitive Science. My academic career took me from Montreal to Paris, Lyon, and Cambridge (UK) until I found myself at a crossroad and decided to go back to my passion for textiles and art. I learned quilting basics during an evening course at Morley College (London), then explored further techniques and styles using books and web resources.
I now make quilts in my South East London studio, near my home where I live with my British husband and two children. I sell my work online or via open studios events and textile fairs. I also do a lot of commission work, often with pieces of fabric that have a special meaning for the client.
Central to my work is the influence of abstract artists such as Josef and Anni Albers, Mark Rothko, Agnes Martin, Paul Klee and Nicolas de Staël, but also of quilters who have pushed traditional boundaries to create deeply personal visions of what a quilt can be, like the Gee’s Bend and Bosna Quilts collectives.
I design my quilts in full size on a wall like oversized collages, using an extensive palette of fabrics that I have collected over the years. I am particularly fond of medallion quilts, where a patchwork composition is surrounded by a wide frame of solid fabric. When I choose solid fabrics, I tend to go for the ones that have texture and depths, like shot cottons andlinens. I also love working with prints but use them sparingly in order to really showcase the designer’s artwork. Liberty of London Tana lawns are a long time favourite. I love colour, but tend to use it in a quiet, muted way. More recently, I have slowed down my practice to explore the possibilities offered by hand stitching, in particular by using the traditional English paper piecing technique with freehand drawings. While time consuming, it has opened up a world of possibilities in terms of design and has proved particularly healing in the tumultuous past years.
Carolyn Mazloomi
I am a self-taught quilt maker, author and independent curator and enjoy making narrative quilts depicting African American history and the status of women. In 1985 I founded the Women of Color Quilters Network, a national organization devoted to presenting, documenting, and educating the public about quilts made by African Americans. I am involved in documenting quilt history and to that end have written fourteen books about African American-made quilts. It is important to include African American quilts and makers in the canon of American quilt history.
With a few exceptions, most of my quilts are done in black and white. I find using only black and white for the imagery in my quilts does not detract the viewer from the message I am trying to convey in my work. I sketch my work on paper before drawing the image on cotton or sending the image to be printed by a textile company. Since I started making quilts fifty years ago, I have seen huge changes in the way quilts are being made. I love all the new gadgets and technology available to quilters that make their work much easier.
I have been able to exhibit my quilts in museums in the United States and abroad and had works acquired by many museums, corporates spaces and individuals for their permanent collection. I am immensely proud that over the years my quilts have brought many honors, such as the National heritage Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts and the United States Artists Fellowship.
Erika Pinkley
Hello there! My name is Erika Pinkley and I live just outside of San Antonio, Texas where I was born 50 years ago. My business is called Little Glass Quilts where I make stained glass panels based off traditional quilt block designs. When I talk about what I do, I like to describe it as my “accidental business”! You see, my husband and I had just started the process of building our forever home. We had just moved back down from Missouri where I had gotten a little crazy back in that house; let me explain … I am half Hispanic and half Swedish, which basically means that I live inside a Crayola box in my head! I LOVE COLOR! LOL! So, in that Missouri house I had painted just about all the walls a different color. Sure, they were soft pastel colors, but no two walls were the same! And so, as we were building our new house, my husband literally begged me to not go crazy on the wall color again! But, as I like to point out, he didn’t say Boo about the windows!
ust before we had started the building process, we also tragically lost my mother to pancreatic cancer. She was the most incredibly talented woman that I ever knew. I was lucky enough to had been put in front of a sewing machine with her at the tender age of nine but over the years she had spent 60+ decades teaching sewing & quilting lessons to me, my friends, and countless students, either in small shops or in her private home sewing studio. After her passing I was going through the process of clearing out her old studio, I found some of her old lesson plans. Her favorite thing to teach by far was quilting and for those classes, her go-to lessons were lap quilt samplers. As I was going through her old binders, something in my head just clicked! Instantly my minds’ eye saw her favorite quilt teaching block designs made of bright & colorful glass hanging in the windows of my new home. I quickly got online and became a YouTube University Graduate! I taught myself about all things-stained glass and began incorporating her favorite quilt block designs into my plans as our house was being built. When the house was done 10 months later, so were my window panels and I finally got to complete my colorful vision of little glass quilts all throughout my new home.
As I shared my story and photos of the completed works on social media, requests began flooding in for custom orders of glass from fellow quilting fans for their own windows. And so it began. I quickly came up with a business name, Little Glass Quilts. Designed a logo based off one of my mothers’ favorite blocks, the Monkey Wrench. Then, it was off to the courthouse to register my DBA, and I immediately began taking orders for custom Little Glass Quilts. With every LGQ I create, I like to think that my mother’s love for everything beautiful and quilting related caries on as an homage to her. While I may have only been working in this medium of glass and lead for just under a year, I have found that my love of all things quilting have effortlessly translated into every block I do!
When I make needle & thread quilts for my own home, I have always tended to lean towards bright colors with a good dose of textures in them and luckily for me, working in glass & lead easily translates into that realm as well. Oftentimes my cloth quilts are furnished by my mother’s enormous and quite random fabric stash, so I do tend to lean towards scrappy looks; again, an easy transition in glass. Traditional blocks like the nine patch, log cabin and sampler blocks are easiest for me to use in either medium because it lets me focus less on the block construction and more on the rhythm of the colors. That being said, I do still start each glass project on paper first, just as I would a fabric version, after all, I am not reinventing the wheel here. Rather, I’m just taking it out for a different kind of spin, one block at a time!