Barbara’s Story • Visit Barbara's Gallery

I have always sewn, starting in grade school and continuing into adulthood, making clothing, baby and home decor items. My interests have spanned most all the handcrafts, usually making items to embellish my home. I have enjoyed meeting and taking classes with some very special teachers in the quilt world. Traveling to many quilt shows has given me the opportunity to make friends with quilters, shop owners, vendors and designers.

Given the opportunity to work as a Technical Reader for The Quilter Magazine, a whole new world opened for me. Thanks to the friendship and guidance I have found there, I was ready for the challenges presented by the opportunity to edit two new quilting magazines. Editing the “Quilts & Coordinates” magazine married my love of quilting with my interest in home decorating. My position as editor of the “Fabric Trends” magazine gave me an opportunity to work with the newest fabrics introduced to quilters. I was privileged to work with many established as well as up and coming designers in putting together several wonderful issues. I have since made my technical reading and editing services available to independent pattern designers and other fabric companies. I contributed some projects and did styled photographs for Elisa Wilson’s Book, “A Gathering of Days”, which was published in 2005.

Besides The State Guild of NJ, I am also a member of the Garden State Quilt Guild and Brownstone Quilt Guild. I have also taught quilting and quilt design to children at the Discover Charter School in Newark as well as adult quilting classes at local quilt shops in New Jersey. As the owner of Love in Stitches, a custom quilt design company, I design custom art quilts for home and office in addition to those published in magazines and books.

Denim Divas is a book that I co-authored with Jacqui Clarkson for Jeanette Crews Publications. This book features ideas of how to embellish store-bought denim and other items, such as hats, purses, totes, jackets and scarves. This book can be purchased at Michaels and A.C. Moore. There is another project that I collaborated with Jacqui on which is featured in the newly released book by Stackpole Publications, “Projects for Fiber Art Lovers.”

I enjoy working with the fabric manufacturers in designing contemporary quilts, using their latest fabrics. I have also been fortunate in having many of my designs published in magazines and catalogs and have launched my teaching and pattern business. All this has led me to working with my good friend and business partner, Yolanda Fundora, and designing the projects for Holiday Quilts book published by Krause Publications. Getting to know each other through our local quilt guild, Garden State Quilters in Chatham, New Jersey, we feel very lucky to have found the opportunity to work together and look forward to many creative years together.

Click here to view some of Barbara's quilt designs.

Yolanda’s Story • Visit Yolanda's Gallery

Go to Yolanda's new website: www.urban-amish.com

A passion for art manifested itself very early in my life. My mother tells me of my four-year-old's refusal to move from the window of an art-supply store in Old Havana until the rainbow box of Prismacolor pencils in the window was procured. I also have a vivid recollection of being chastised for removing everything from my kindergarden satchel except blank pieces of paper, a series of carrot drawings, and my Prismacolor box. I needed to see some vague "someone" to show them my "portfolio". How this idea of the workings of the art world had come to a four-year-old is unfathomable now, but somehow my imagination had converted my kindergarten teacher into an important art dealer.

In 1961, a few years after the Prismacolor episode, my parents and I emigrated to New York City, where family awaited us. In New York my art education began in earnest. In fourth grade a retiring art teacher, perhaps recognizing a kindred spirit, decided to take me under her wing. She determinedly prepared me for entering every single contest available to my age group that year. Wanting to make her last year as an art teacher one for both of us to remember, she got special permission from the school and spent an entire day with me sitting on the Great Lawn in Central Park. She parked me with all her personal art supplies and made me draw the same scene (the twin towers of a building on 75th and Central Park West—an orienting beacon for West Siders walking in the park) over and over in all the media I could handle at the time: charcoal, oil pastel, my beloved Prismacolors, and chalk pastel. We won seven gold medals and one silver that year in Manhattan and New York City All-Borough art contests, one in every category we entered. My parents could no longer doubt that art would play an important role in my life, and made sure I got all the technical art education possible from then on. I had private after-school lessons and frequent trips to the Metropolitan Museum of Art and Museum of Modern Art.

Fabric design and quilting found me much later in my artistic career. I had moved to Puerto Rico in 1981 both to regain my Hispanic cultural heritage and to pursue my fine art. While there my work caught the eye of recruiters for a design studio to be dually-based in New York City and San Juan. I moved back to New York in 1991 and entered a new phase of my career, licensing designs for both three-dimensional and surface-design products.I learned to design for textiles through having to adapt some of my illustrations for use on home-decor fabrics. I discovered that I deeply enjoyed this area of commercial design. A long and rewarding period of both licensed and freelance work with some of the major textile companies followed, VIP/Cranston, Concord, and Free Spirit among them.
 
In the last few years, my intense love of fabric design has led me more and more to seek and enjoy the company of quilters. Through my membership in the Garden State Quilters I was very fortunate to meet Barbara Campbell, whose quilting design and publishing expertise has been a welcome complement to my fabric design and illustration skills. We combine our broad-based experience to bring fabric lines to market that quilters can enjoy and use successfully to create works of art.

Go to Yolanda's new website: www.urban-amish.com