About me

Tansy Designs is the part of my life where I want to share my love of making things with people outside of my home!  I have always loved to design and create things. From being a little girl and loving arts and crafts, playdough and coloring… to designing school banners and working at a fabric and craft store in high school… to painting rooms and making enormous linen slip covers to recover an overstuffed chair, couch and ottoman as a new wife… to making stage curtains and Halloween costumes as a new mother… to knitting, sewing and eventually quilting, paper-piecing and bag making as I have gained more daytime hours to devote to imagination… sewing and creating have always been a part of my life.

In 2012, I began sewing nearly ever day.  My sewing machine claimed its own space on a re-purposed kitchen table in the kids’ playroom and it stayed there.  I always had some sort of project going. I began making cloth napkins and sold them in a few places around town, on line, and at holiday and craft shows.  I loved creating and I loved that people would contact me for more, but I got bored and when they all sold out, I didn’t make more. I still made things for my family like Christmas cards, backpacks, elaborate Halloween costumes, umbrellas and started re-tailoring vintage and thrifted clothing for one daughter and altering nearly every piece of ready-to-wear for the other one.  And then… they would grow out of them!

A friend of mine, Trisha, who is also an avid creator, wanted to learn to knit.  I taught her, and we knit together some, but you couldn’t keep us away from our sewing machines for long.  We started to get together to sew a few times a month. It soon became more often and our “sewing days” turned into GSD days. (Get Shit Done days)  She taught me all about quilting, I taught her all about zippers.

I soon found that I couldn’t spend enough time getting all of my ideas down on paper.  While traveling, I would see tile patterns, tapestries and roof lines that would inspire quilt designs.  Market displays and pebbles would inspire color pallets. While I knew that I didn’t want to make a bunch of repetitive things to sell, I wanted to share my ideas with other people looking for inspiration.  My husband of nearly 24 years has always been supportive of my creative outlets and has vehemently encouraged me to take them a step further. When we held a church bake sale and I was eager to tell him how much the kids made, he excitedly exclaimed that’s great!  What was your goal? I just looked at him. I said, we sold everything we made, our goal was to not bring anything home!! He is very business minded and could not fathom such an ethereal goal. While I tend to think about colors and display and marketing, he thinks about profit margins and deadlines and sales goals.  Discussing my business “plans” with him is always an interesting discussion for both of us!

In 2019 I joined a virtual sew along on Instagram hosted by my favorite designer, Alison Glass. The idea was to use Foundation Paper Piecing to construct a minimum of 40 blocks from her Trinket Quilt pattern over the course of 8 weeks and then combine them into a quilt top. This was such a fun experience! The other participants (hundreds!!) were supportive and inspiring and it was a wonderful experience that I enjoyed from start to finish. Several of my blocks were featured in the weekly wrap up newsletters and I couldn’t believe that my work was getting noticed! Then right before the final week of the sew along, when I was meant to be putting the whole quilt top together, a family member was in crisis and I left to help out, leaving the project and sewing machine at home. On the long, lonely drive out of town I thought of all the things hat I had enjoyed during the sew along. I loved figuring out a new way to see each trinket to make them personal to me. I loved watching other makers’ blocks emerge. And of course I loved the camaraderie with the IG quilting community. I had wanted to finish the quilt and enter it in the final contest but it just wasn’t going to happen. Instead of looking at it as a loss, I decide to look at all I’d gained. I moved on and spent the week another way.

Miraculously, I was able to return home earlier than I had anticipated and barely screeched the last few rows through my sewing machine. I photographed the quilt top on the last day, in an hour, with my oldest daughter and emailed my best picture to the Alison Glass team. I was excited because by finishing in time, I would receive a Finisher’s enamel pin!!

Can you believe I won the Grand Prize? I cannot. I still cannot.

As I branch out and meet more people in the creative community, both in real life and on-line, I see new things, I learn new things and I imagine new things. I have started teaching classes at my local quilt shop, Blue Bar Quilts in Middleton, Wisconsin. Trisha and I have taught several zipper pouch classes and Maker’s Workshops together. We are set to teach a Row of the Month class that may need to go virtual due to COVID-19.

I have just published a new pattern, Zen Blocks, with the help and support of a wonderful friend, Natalie of SewHungryHippie.