Hello from Jane

Thank you Annabel for forming this group! I'm really looking forward to the challenges and to getting to know you all better.

I'm Jane Davila from Connecticut in the US. I live about an hour north of New York City which gives me the best of all things - a quintessential New England small town that's just a short train ride away from Broadway and the biggest art scene in the world. I've lived in a lot of different places (Miami, Dallas, Woodstock, Lima Peru, etc) but I can't imagine living anywhere else now. Of course it was 104F in NYC yesterday, so somewhere cooler sounds lovely in this second, lol.

My mom and I opened a quilt shop in 1990 and I learned to quilt and began teaching quilt classes there. In 2003 a friend and I developed a series of art quilting classes that grew into 2 books with C&T Publishing, Art Quilt Workbook and Art Quilts at Play. Since then I've written another book for C&T and another will be released in OCtober 2012.

Two years ago we closed our shop (after 19 years) and now I work as a freelance teacher, traveling all over the world, author and designer. In January I accepted the position of freelance editor of the digital emagazine Quilting Arts In Stitches. My husband and I continue to sell all of the fun art quilting, mixed media and surface design supplies that I used to sell in the shop but as vendors at quilt shows and online, so we do a fair amount of traveling for that too.

My husband is an artist also, working in oils and in sculpture. He emigrated to the US from Peru and is from a family of artists. His father was a well-known abstract expressionist in South America and one of his brothers is a surrealist. Our daughter lives about 15 minutes away from us and is super creative also (she hasn't embraced the label "artist" yet) and is a whiz at etsy and online selling of her crafts.

Because I started out as a printmaker, a lot of my fiber work incorporates printmaking techniques and I tend to work fairly small. A lot of my recent work has been for deadlines (books, magazines, teaching proposals) and I really need a place and a reason to do some work for fun and just for me. I am so looking forward to our challenges here and seeing what we all come up with!