Parenthetical Quilt Pattern
Quilt Size: 60″ x 48″
Skill Level: Beginner
I love parentheses, in any form I can find them. Brackets too. If it is in the parenthetical family I can’t get enough. I went through a period about ten years ago during which every typographic piece I did was overflowing with as many parentheses as I could fit. I made ornate decorations with them, I blew them up huge and created backgrounds, heck even dotted lines were replaced with microscopic brackets. All this was the starting point for Parenthetical.

For this quilt I wanted to showcase two of the prints from Pear Tree (Partridge in a… and Covey), but I didn’t want the quilt to be just about those prints. I wanted a cushion between those main prints from the rest of the quilt, a way to isolate them from the larger whole, and before long my mind drifted back to those early typographic explorations. Eureka!

Opposites Attract Quilt Pattern
Quilt Size: 100″ x 80″
Skill Level: Beginner
Opposites Attract is all about the interplay of elements; the shapes push and pull at each other, elements fill the negative spaces that others leave. They build upon each other in vertical ladders and reach out to each other to fill the silences of the negative spaces between them. Depending on how I look at it, I see this quilt as both frenetic and calm. It is an exploration of asymmetry and balance.

In so many ways this quilt owes giant debts of gratitude to two of my favorite paintings: Henri Matisse’s The Green Line (Mme Matisse) of 1905 and Olga Rozanova’s Untitled (Green Stripe) of 1917. Each of these paintings feels instructive to my approach to quilting, and helped shape the background for developing this quilt.

Bird’s Eye View Quilt Pattern
Quilt Size: 82″ x 62″
Skill Level: Intermediate
Bird’s Eye View is based on one of my favorite traditional weaving patterns. Starting with the concentric diamonds of the Bird’s Eye pattern I wanted to capture the subtle texture of a close-up view of a piece of woven cloth. Of course, I had to throw in a bit of asymmetry. I love the way this quilt feels like it continues on beyond the binding and at the same time it imbues the design with a casual, almost accidental quality, bringing a vibrance to the formal structure of the original pattern.

Naptime Pillow Project Card
Pillow Size: 14″ x 14″
Skill Level: Beginner
I will always be typographer at heart, so when I started thinking about making a napping pillow I immediately thought about the strings of Zs so often used to typographically denote sleeping. I played around with a few configurations, but loved how the vertical columns of Zs played in with the solids to form fabulous zig-zags (another thing I can’t get enough of).

This pattern is currently available in the Thomas Knauer Sews shop.

>Growth Chart Quilt Project Card
Quilt Size: 42″ x 36″
Skill Level: Beginner
I keep wanting to make my daughter (I call her Bee) a baby quilt, but I think it’s too late for that; she’s three now. That is what set me to thinking about this quilt. It is amazing how fast kids grow, and so wonderful to watch every step of that process. I wanted to design a baby quilt that subtly reminds us to watch every moment of that growth, to notice all the tiny increments as well as the giant leaps.

This pattern is currently available in the Thomas Knauer Sews shop.

Tweet Embroidery and Pillow Pattern
Pillow Size: 16″ x 12″
Embroidery Size: 9″ x 4″
Skill Level: Beginner
I couldn’t resist doing a Tweet pillow. If you know me at all you know that I spend a lot of my time on Twitter; I think of it as a way to cope with working at home after a lifetime in Academia. So when Pear Tree came into being my first thoughts for an embroidery pattern was Tweet, the little partridge and all. While I am a novice embroiderer, luckily I am friends (via Twitter of course) with the amazing and talented Nicole. Happily she was excited to collaborate on this project and did a fantastic job in doing the stitch design.

This pattern is currently available in the Thomas Knauer Sews shop.