Podcast: Designing Textiles with Leah Kabaker

Hello My Quilting Friends! I have a great interview for you today with Leah Kabaker. Click Here to find her blog No Idle Hands Here. Leah is a hobby quilter, artist, and former textile designer from California. She has a fascinating perspective on so many things and I hope you enjoy our interview today!

Leah has been a member of the San Fernando Valley Quilters Association. She worked for a converter fabric company in LA that converted gray goods to finished fabrics. She would work with designers and design fabrics herself to reduce the colors in the artwork and create repeats so it would print continuously.

We also discuss the huge amount of printed fabrics being produced for quilting and how design groups like Cotton + Steel have worked well because they have marketed themselves successfully. According to Leah, most quilting prints are designed in 6 weeks and when they’re sold out, they’re out. So you have to work fast and have an eye for trends far in advance.

Don’t forget you can find all the podcast episodes in one place at LeahDay.com/Podcast!

Now for a few updates around the house:

Today is also the first day of the month so we have a new block ready for you today! Click Here to find the new pattern.

I’m really looking forward to teaching you how to piece these curved petal shapes for this Daisy Dresden Plate. I also used rulers to quilt the center circles which was a fun challenge. Be looking forward to those new videos on the first and second Monday of the month.

I’m still dragging through this home renovation. You can read more about it here. The last two days have felt very slow because the painting process is so time consuming, but yesterday we got the hall finished!

This took forever to paint because of the trim around the five doors. I don’t ever want to paint this hall myself again. It’s so fiddly!

The living room hasn’t made much progress in the last two days because the new paneling we nailed up didn’t like being painted. The first layer of paint just slid right off the slippery surface. We tested a few different things and ultimately found the slick design printed on the boards needed to be sanded down, then primed with a high bonding primer.

I’m determined to finish this and clean everything up by Sunday. I just can’t take any more days with the house so messed up.

Doing all this work has reminded me how much I love to quilt and make videos. While I’ve been painting I’ve been planning new video series in my head so I hope when I’m done it will be super fast and easy to create.

But I have a big mess to clean up first. Wish me luck!

Let’s go quilt (or sand and paint a wall. I think you know which we would all prefer!)

Leah Day