Marriage, the birth of my son Mark, and a divorce left me a single working parent during the late ‘60’s and most of the 70’s. My thunderstruck meeting with John Holbron in 1976 led eventually to living together, a move from Seattle to Hawaii for eight years, and a marriage which still goes pretty well. We also lived in Bucks County for a couple of years, and finally in 1990 moved to Whidbey Island, Washington, where we are deeply and permanently planted. We live in a little house, surrounded by a big Japanese-style garden, companioned by two elegant Oriental cats and two rambunctious Australian Shepherds still in adolescence.

My studio is nearby in a commercial space in the small village where we live, tucked away in a quiet corner away from traffic. It contains two looms, two large work tables, hundreds of weaving yarns, thousands of fabrics, beads, clothing patterns, and a broad range of tools for all my fiber works. When I’m at the sewing table, I look out a large window into a massive Blue Atlas Cedar in which I keep a filled bird feeder, and the comings and goings of the birds helps me stay connected to the world outside.

During my years in Hawaii, I taught myself to weave and have been designing and making unique fabrics ever since. Quiltmaking entered my life briefly in Hawaii but settled in to stay and to take over the territory once I moved to Whidbey Island. I’ve learned a lot from several friends who teach, and – as with my knitting and weaving – I’ve been able to use the basic skills I acquired and develop my own aesthetic and way of working. I always have a number of different things in process simultaneously, and work on any one proceeds by fits and starts. Some years ago I figured out that working fast makes me tense and mistake-prone, so my usual pace on a quilt could be characterized as methodical and meticulous. This allows me to enjoy the process, which is about 90% of what I enjoy about making quilts.

Some folks tell me that my quilts subtly show my background as a weaver; they embody my understanding of texture, color, and pattern while presenting a quite different approach to working with threads and cloth. My themes and abstract images reflect my lifelong connection to and comfort in the natural world, as well as my open-armed delight in relationships with people. From my Quaker background comes a preference for simplicity, which nonetheless often embodies complexity. I completely love doing this work.

My work has been exhibited and sold in Honolulu, Hawaii; in Washington, D.C.; Boise, Idaho; Seattle, Washington; Tillamook, Oregon; and here on Whidbey Island. I put on two or three solo shows a year in local venues, and an annual joint studio show with a painter/printmaker friend. I’ve been doing private commissions for many years, and continue to enjoy that approach to creating new work.

Generally I work quite methodically, though I rarely have any idea of what a finished quilt will look like when I begin. The fabrics are almost exclusively Indonesian batiks, the quilting mostly done with metallic threads so the quilt surface literally sparkles. I am precise without being a perfectionist, and I work rather slowly so that I sustain my enjoyment of the process rather than being tense over it. At any given time, there are several quilts at various stages of development on the design walls, and work on any one proceeds by fits and starts.