Rose Hughes and her long sensuous curves....

Like a Raven, Rose Hughes hoards and admires shiny embellishments, adding them in just the right spot to her quilts. You can discern her quilts from her readily recognizable style that features long sensuous curves and layers and layers of fabric forming an unforgettable fantasy landscape. She's provided several photos. Her Ebb n'flow: Eventide, pictured first; Ebb n'flow: Mesas, next; Ebb n'flow: Hills, next; and then a comparison between her California Live Oak and an older version of an oak in her Never Stand Alone which was made in 2004. All other quilts pictured here were made in 2009. Now here is Rose in her own words!   

by Rose Hughes:
Do you find quilting?

Or does quilting find you?

In my high-school and college days I spent many hours studying textiles, playing with dyes and stitching of all sorts, but then I went off to work in the banking industry. Years went by, my corporate life changed, grew and expanded, and I spent my time making ATM/POS networking come to life. A very interesting time, I may add, made all the better one trip to Seattle where I discovered quilts. From that point on I was consciously hooked on fabric, and it wasn’t long before quilting became a lifeline during corporate travel.

For a number of years after that I learned ‘the craft’, bought my first sewing machine, (hubby knew it was serious when the darkroom came down and the sewing machine went up), and took classes from some wonderful teachers. It took me a while, but while learning traditional quilting, it struck me, “I’m not a very good pattern follower… I really just want to do my own thing.”

Off I went, and almost as soon as I set out to do my own thing, I discovered that a big part of that includes curves, long-sensuous curves, tight circles and everything in between. The other part of what I love is adding sparkle and dimension to the fabric surface. Appliqué, the traditional answer, never was my favorite thing to do, and this realization caused a bit of a stumbling block, but not for long.

Taking bits of what I learned along the way I set out to try and come up with an easy way to create my curves. The journey began, and after many quilts along this path my Fast-Piece Appliqué™ construction method was born.

My book, Dream Landscape: Artful Quilts with Fast-Piece Appliqué™, published in 2008, by Martingale, gave me the biggest opportunity to share this method with everyone. Sharing methods, and of course THE FABRIC, how we choose it and how we use it, is one of my favorite things about being a quilt artist. I like to encourage people to use fabric to share their own ideas and view of the world. The paths we all take after that lead to our ah-hah moments and even some oh-no moments are the ones I find most enlightening.

My own ah-hah and oh-no moments have led to large collections of fabric (of course), but also yarn and beads. All having found a welcome home in my studio. Couldn’t live without them…. So many possibilities! Opportunities!

The journey continues and I’ve been working on my second book, also with Martingale, called Exploring Embellishments.

In it I talk about fabricating our own shiny, fun objects out of all sorts of materials. Some of my favorites at the moment are wool roving, air-dry clay and of course fabric. This book is due June 2010, but these self-created embellishments have been finding their way onto my quilts for years. (There’s a bit of sneak peak to be found about the wool gems in the Feb/March issue of Quilting Arts. Wahoo!)

So does one find quilting, or does quilting find you? One never really can tell, but the journey along the way is one I love to travel and share.

p.s. there’s lots more sharing happening in 2010 through my newly added FaceBook FanPage, and of course my RavenSpeak Quilts blog…