A little about me…
I had the fortune to grow up in my grandparent’s fabric shop, the Kenai Fabric Center, since I was 10 days old in Kenai, Alaska. Growing up in that creative environment has really shaped my life. Art classes were always my favorite subjects in school and over the years I’ve worked in various media including, painting, photography, wheel-thrown ceramics, silk screening, fresco, fine art restoration and of course various techniques in sewing and quilting. I began my college career studying art history and restoration in Florence, Italy, but finished up with a BA in Anthropology from the University of Alaska Anchorage.
While in college I worked part-time at my family’s quilt shop and found that I was pretty good at making samples, particularly those involving raw-edge applique techniques. This was also when I began my love affair with batiks, which have always reminded me of watercolors. After graduation I worked in the local museum and tribal archive for many years, but continued to help my family make up samples for their store. In 2007 I decided to try making a design of my own. At that time there weren’t any designs with caribou available, so that was my first subject – to fill that gap for Alaska quilt shops. Alaska continues today to be my primary force of inspiration, and my business has grown in these past 9 years to now allow me to work from home designing. I still occasionally help out at my family’s fabric shop, which is now owned by my mother and her sisters, raising the 4th generation of my family’s girls among the thousands of bolts of fabrics.
In late 2010 I had my first opportunity to work directly with Hoffman California Fabrics using some of their floral prints. Since that time I have exclusively used their batiks and prints in my designs. Their batiks are of the highest quality and perfect for the raw edge applique technique I use. In 2016 I was fortunate enough to design my first Signature Batik collection with Hoffman, and in early 2017 my Into the Wild Signature Batik Collection was released, along with ten new patterns incorporating the fabrics. In the summer of 2018 I released my second collection, From the Depths, along with twelve new designs, and am currently working on my third collection to be released next Spring of 2020.