Quiltmaker - July/August 2017 - 70

5

Quilting and Finishing

Layer and baste together the
backing, batting and quilt top.
Notice in the photo that Darlene
ended some of the spirals with a
freeform snowﬂake in Wendy's quilt
Refer to the quilting placement diagram. Quilt swirls all over the quilt
top as shown. .
Bind the quilt.

Designer Spotlight
Wendy Sheppard
I've worked with Wendy to write
several of her Quiltmaker patterns.
She seems to have an endless number of ideas and I really admire her
creativity, so much that I decided to
learn more about her. I thought you
might like to meet her, too.
Wendy grew up in Southeast Asia
and came to America for college.
She graduated with degrees in
Chemical Engineering and worked
in the research arena for a few
years. She currently lives in northern Virginia with her husband and
daughter.

Quilting Placement

Wendy has always been passionate about hand- and needlework,
but never had a desire to machine
sew. In fact, Wendy was 31 when
she ﬁrst touched a sewing machine.
She joined a friend's group to learn
to quilt. Foregoing the assigned
quilt because she thought it would
be too simple, she found a mixed
pieced and applique quilt pattern in
a library book and asked her friend
to use it to teach her to quilt instead.
From the beginning Wendy set out
to conquer quilting. From then on,
she was smitten with making quilts
and has about 200 quilts in her
stash.

Wendy started designing quilts in
2008, focusing more on design
after her daughter was born.
Designing allowed her to stay
at home with her daughter and
provided something different for
Wendy to do besides baby duties. I asked her about the design
process she follows. She told me
she keeps a list of potential design ideas in a log. Her log also
contains pictures of antique quilts,
airport carpet patterns and a
greeting card. As we can tell, she
gathers ideas everywhere-anything that catches her eye could
turn into a quilt design later. When
she is asked for one of her designs, she looks through her log
to see if there's one that will work
with the fabrics on hand. Wendy's
designs can take a couple of
hours to a couple of days to complete, as she sometimes needs a
little more time and fresh eyes to
ﬁnalize the design.
Wendy Sheppard designs and
quilts for several familiar fabric
companies: Hoffman California Fabrics, Quilting Treasures,
RJR Fabrics and Windham Fabrics.
You'll ﬁnd many of her designs
with fabrics from these companies
in Quiltmaker, McCall's Quilting
and Quick Quilts.
There's so much more about
Wendy than room for me to tell.
Check out her blog
wendysheppard.net to see more
of Wendy's quilts, a list of books
she's written and machine quilting
tutorials.
Tricia Patterson* QM Associate Editor

70

Quiltmaker * July/August '17
http://www.wendysheppard.net
Quiltmaker - July/August 2017

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