Quilt Dairy

The second quilting book that I wrote, "Glad Yule," was published in 2007. My mother died in January of that year and I fell way behind in getting the book done. Danielle Damen came to my rescue and helped with sewing samples, editing, and photo styling of many of the pictures in the book.

Here's "Dairy Stars" from Glad Yule. This quilt uses Wisconsin dairy colors -- cheddar, cream, and butter yellow -- combined with two sizes of eight pointed stars to make a holiday quilt that glows with warm, buttery color. The artful cow in the photo was made by a Fond du Lac area artist. Notice the outline of the state of Wisconsin in the Holstein's black and white pattern.

We had a tough time photographing this quilt. Steve Jias, the photographer, used great digital equipment, but the metallic fabrics used for the block backgrounds turned dull in the photos. So we stopped using a lot of metallic fabric in quilts for books or patterns since it is so hard to photograph them.

This quilt has cow fabric on the back of it, a true salute to my home state of Wisconsin, and to all of the dairymen and women in the Hayes and Luedtke families on my side of the family.