My greatest joy is working with fabrics. I have always loved the texture, colors and feeling of pieces of cloth. I have thousands of pieces of fabric in my collection encompassing every color of the rainbow. I have fabrics produced in Africa, India, New Zealand, Australia, France, Italy, Japan and China as well as fabrics from other countries which are more difficult to get that friends and colleagues have sent to me after visiting there. I have fabrics as old as 1820, one of which I used in the jacket illustration for The Last Will and Testament of an Extremely Distinguished Dog (Henry Holt). When I am working with vintage fabrics, I even love the smell of the cottons as I iron them.

I love fabric so much that I work for Lyndhurst Studio, a division of Northcott Monarch, a fabric company that produces my designs. When I was a child, I made doll clothes for all of my dolls creating many outfits from felts and fake furs. I never dreamed of making a career with my sewing but have been very lucky in how my work has been accepted.

I had a whole other career as "The Galloping Groomer" where I went into people's homes in New York City and Westchester and groomed their dogs and cats. It was a wonderful job and I got to work on NYPD dogs from the Bomb Squad as well as dogs who lived on the upper east side of Manhattan.

What the two careers have in common, of course, are scissors, which I adore as well as in sewing, every ruler and thread that I can find! I love doing commissions for people and organizations mostly commemorative, historical and celebratory. My favorite commission is called, "AFL-CIO 13 Million Voices Strong." It hangs in the National Headquarters of the AFL-CIO in Washington D.C. and is available as a poster from their website. I work on many commissions for people to celebrate weddings, anniversaries, birthdays and Bar or Bat-Mitzvahs and use family photographs that I photo-transfer on fabric to create a special piece for them with their favorite colors. I feel blessed to be a contemporary quilt artist in an artform which is truly American and when I am stuck in a design, I always return to those traditional American quilts for inspiration.

There are some pieces I have done because artistically I needed to, some of which deal with difficult subject matter. I created a piece called, "Article # 5," which is a strong piece with photo-transfer images of the Holocaust, Vietnam, and Tienneman Square. I wanted to do the piece to express my belief in the importance for human rights and did not care if it sold or not. It toured the United States and was later purchased byMaurice Sendak, who asked me to sell it to him. So, I have been lucky that my work reaches people.

When I am doing a work, I put my heart in it. I love the process of my art even though it can be difficult at times in construction and painful in meaning to me. I have created two pieces about cruelty to monkeys which I have in my collection. During "Article # 5" and the monkey pieces, I cried a lot. Several of my pieces are concerned with the content and meaning first and color and design secondly. When I worked on my first book, Stand For Children, written by Marian Wright Edelman, I read and re-read the speech Marian gave in Washington D.C. in 1996 hundreds of times. I wanted to capture in my work her beautiful message. I also wanted to celebrate my artform so I used every technique I knew of in quiltmaking that would expose children and adults to this wonderful form.

I love fabric because I get to work with thousands of pieces of fabric from all different countries and all different time periods (when I can find them) and as painters use paint, fabric is my palette and it is the most diverse palette I have ever found. Since fabrics are created by all kinds of people, I get to use all of these artists in my work and when I see fabrics I have designed used in textile artists work, it is thrilling. I will never forget when I saw a piece of fabric I designed in a line called Ocean Dreams used as a border for a beautiful appliquéd quilt of flowers. I couldn't believe how uniquely she used it and it made me happy. I am proud of the quilt I did for the AFL-CIO as well as the commemorative piece for the City University of New York celebrating their 150th anniversary, called "Look at Their Faces" and hangs permanently at Baruch College in NYC. I have a few large works I am proud of including, "Resistance to Tyranny is Obedience to God", based on the suffrage movement and named as one of 15 statement quilts to represent the century in 2000. I am also proud of a piece called, "Tartan #1: Autumn Light" that will be shown in Yokahama, Japan this fall and then it will go in late November to the New England Quilt Museum when it returns from Japan. One quilt I created that makes me happy is called, "Tartan # 3: A Midsummer's Day Dream. It hangs in my dining room and has all my favorite colors and textures in it: reds, oranges, silks and brocades with touches of green and green-blue.

Please explore my website. You will find information about my books, my fabric line, fabric art, and biographical information about me. I have also provided links to websites that teachers and librarians may find useful for programming with my books. I hope that you will learn all about me and my work on this website, but if you have any other questions, feel free to email them to me. Please be patient as I am sometimes traveling--and often working--so it may be a few days or longer until I reply to you.