Sewing, blogging, and creative business.
I’m very excited to have finished this patchwork Progress Pride Flag quilt. The pattern is by Bobbie Gentili from Geeky Bobbin. All of the fabrics are scraps from my stash.
This was a fun project and the finished quilt is really bright and colorful. As part of this process, I also enjoyed learning more about how the design of the Progress Pride flag came to be.
I just finished reading Blueprints of Fashion: Home Sewing Patterns of the 1940s. This is my first deep dive into the history of home sewing in America and it’s made me reflect on the moment sewing is experiencing in our culture right now. The role of sewing in the lives of women has radically changed,Read More →
Waiting for the Sample Spree doors to open. Photo by The Quilt Room “I’ve seen people line up five hours before we open the doors. You’d think it was the Rolling Stones concert circa 1975,” says Bob Ruggiero, Vice President of Marketing for Quilts, Inc. the company that puts on Quilt Market, the quilting industry’sRead More →
On today’s episode of the While She Naps podcast we’re talking about building a handmade clothing brand with my guest, Courtney Chu, of the handmade clothing brand CourtneyCourtney. Courtney Chu was trained as an industrial designer and worked as a children’s fashion designer. She’s obsessed with transforming and saving clothing from landfills through children’sRead More →
Handheld Handmade is an innovative ecommerce service launching next week that operates entirely via text messaging. It’s the first of its kind in the handmade retail scene, and among the first text messaging ecommerce platforms in the United States. A year in development the San Francisco based company is the brainchild of Kelly Rand, anRead More →
On today’s episode of the While She Naps podcast we’re talking about building a career in as an expert in the quilting industry with my guest, Ebony Love. An award-winning author and quilter Ebony is recognized as one of the leading experts in fabric die-cutting techniques. She’s best known as the author of The BigRead More →
Creating new, high-quality content is really time-consuming and isn’t something you can do every single day. A great blog post, video tutorial, or podcast interview takes hours, sometimes even days of effort to create, edit, and publish. In the interim, we still need to share interesting content with our followers. The best way to doRead More →
The first week of July I got an email from a podcast listener named Elizabeth. Hi Abby, I listen to your podcast regularly and I wondered if anyone has addressed yet how the tariffs are going to affect small craft businesses and fabric manufacturers that print their fabric overseas? I haven’t really seen anything inRead More →
On today’s episode of the While She Naps podcast we’re talking about creating a quilt show with my guest, Matt Reese. Matt is the owner of Road to California, the premier consumer quilt show west of the Rocky Mountains. Road to California features over 1,000 antique, traditional, art, and modern quilts and awards over $92,000 in prizesRead More →
In June I went to see Roxane Gay speak with my friend, Jenny. “Did you know she had bariatric surgery?” Jenny asked me. I hadn’t heard. She recommended I read a piece Roxane wrote about it on Medium. I actually listened to Roxane read the piece (which is a really cool thing that Medium does) andRead More →
On today’s episode of the While She Naps podcast we’re talking about running an online and brick-and-mortar fabric shop with my guest, Kelly Stevens of Superbuzzy. After finishing graduate school and some years working in higher education administration, Kelly rediscovered an early love of textiles and design in the late 1990’s. Upon discovering Japanese craftRead More →