Jamie Wallen loves to play. His playground is his studio: he draws pictures with his longarm machine; he paints with threads; and he uses a grid as his field when creating a new design. When Jamie was a child, his mother took in mending, and he often fell asleep to the sound of the sewing machine. As an adult, he left a highly stressful nursing career after seeing an ad in a quilting magazine, and he took to longarm quilting as easily as picking up a pencil. Jamie shares how he strives to make threadwork look like a photograph, blending multiple shades of threads to create one color. He offers ideas about printing your own fabrics, as well as creating quilt designs both simple and complex by utilizing a grid and starting with basic shapes. To open the show, Alex demos a fun and fast quilted mini basket using just two squares of fabric and a piece of fusible batting.
Show 1708: Jamie Wallen's Playground debuts on Monday, October 12, 2015.