2626 http://www.quiltnow.co.uk http://www.quiltnow.co.ukINTERVIEW
traditional-appliqué – I
wanted something that
was easy to manipulate
but also sturdy and with
strong colours that was durable. It is a
set of values I had in my head regarding
the fabric, I wanted to create something
that was missing in the market, so we
tried cotton bases for more than a year
until we got what we wanted.” By 2005,
having found the cotton that Pat and
Walter were happy with, Art Gallery
Quilts was established and in October
2005, they attended their first Quilt
Market as a business. In those early years,
Pat was the sole designer for Art Gallerybrown and
bluey-grey... but at that
time there were only around 12
colours available and I couldn’t create a
landscape with those so I thought, ‘What if
I paint on the fabric to recreate the colours
that I want myself?’ so I bought the book
Prepare to Dye Fabrics and began painting
on fabric using heat-setting to create the
colours I wanted.” At this point, Pat started
to show me photos of these early works
including painted fabric, gradated fabric,
batiks, salt dyeing, monoprinting, stamping
and many more techniques. She said, “I
started to play, experiment, and I became
a master”. These photos were from the
early 90s, and I could see how these
earlier painted fabric inspired her later
commercial fabric collections. Pat showed
her local guild group the fabrics that she
had painted to create her art quilts and
the ladies in the guild loved them so much
that they asked Pat if they could buy fat
quarters from her.By 1999, Pat was selling a lot of
fabric, she had set up her first website, and
the popularity of her fabric soon became
too much to handle on her own. Pat, with
Walter, spent over a year contacting mills
to find cotton they could use to start
producing Pat’s designs in much
larger quantities: “A lot of cotton at that
time was hard or thick, I wanted a cotton
that you could actually piece, machine-
piece, hand-piece, English-paper piece,
raw-edge appliqué, hand-appliqué andIf it’s a Pat
Bravo collection,
it has to have
pink in it
Pat’s Matchmade collectionDownload this free
Indie Folk quilt pattern at
http://www.artgalleryfabrics.com/projects