When we came back from Houston in November, I promised to you all (and, I must admit, also to myself) that we would have astonished you not only by enlarging our offer of fantasy fabrics and patchwork and quilting tools, but only in the way we are used to… So we have not simply added some new instruments related to this technique, but we have tried to awake your curiosity about this art, making you fall in love with the colors and flavors that are so well famous all over the USA! And now, after our last newsletter you all know it: this year our Festa del Ricamo will enjoy the presence of a great name of the patchwork design: McKenna Ryan. McKenna is a beautiful woman whose face is that of a girl, maybe thanx to the pure air she breaths in Montana, where she lives and works (I'm sorry, I mean she "creates"!). She is as sweet as a fairy princess with the colors we all imagine on such a figure: blond hair like the wheat and the eyes as blue as the sea. And we find these colors also in her quilts, in her very personal pictorial style where McKenna concentrates all her deep love for nature. Such a big love made her choose to leave the big city of Boston as to settle in the most country place in the USA: the Montana! Her patchwork charts are a real triumph of flowers and animals, landscapes of beaches and flowered files, swirls of colors which are the background for some mottos, or just simple words which represent those values we all would like to breath like love, loyalty, friendship, faith and life! They could be "complicated", at a first glance, but they are really funny and based on the appliqué technique with the iron-on adhesive vlieseline: almost a game for children once you've seen how it works :-) But I do not want to tell you too much. McKenna will explain to you everything at the Festa :-) In the meantime, we are inserting in these days her charts so you can start getting used to them! Why do not you begin with one of these nice charts by the Fig Tree? Also behind this brand there is a nice American woman, Joanna, in love with patchwork and with a particular passion for vintage which is evident in all her charts: so retrò but still so fresh! And maybe this is the reason why they are so magic :-) The creations by Joanna are delicate, just as if they were spreading a fragrance, but they are also innovative since, thanks to her fantasy, this smiling Californian woman makes us understand that patchwork is not only bed-covers. Here is a nice example: Sparrows. Just tell me if they do not see them on a lamp or above the bed of a baby or full of perfume for our closet! Or just tell me if you cannot but make this weird bag because patchwork is first of all this: the triumph of creative sewing, the audacious matching of fabrics that, as it happens with the best symphonies, gives life to a wonderful harmony which lasts forever! Just try it! Happy creative sewing and… A big hug!