Cat

A little bit about me . . .

I live in South Australia and I'm a Traffic/Civil Engineer by trade. This is how I became "Hardhatcat!!!" My favourite craft hobbies are knitting and quilting. If often gets too hot in Summer here for kntting (last year my outside thermometer burst at 120ºF/50ºC), but my sewing room is nice and cool, so I often do most of my sewing in the warmer months.

I used to be an off and on quilter and didn't do much work until I was part of the Harry Potter Craftdom and was introduced to fan-based quilting and paper piecing. As soon as I started paper piecing I knew I had found the style that suited me the most. I was taught the paper piecing technique from Jennifer Ofenstein (Sewhooked.org) via her online videos and plenty of emails. It wasn't long before I started designing patterns myself. My first paper pieced pattern that I designed was an old wizard pattern, that is still one of my favourite patterns to this day. I have an Etsy store and I also have free patterns available on the Guest Designers page on Sewhooked.org. I knew after reading Twilight just exactly how I wanted to express my fandom. It started off with my Forbidden Fruit pattern, which is a paper piecing homage to the front cover of Twilight. This was then made available for free from the Sewhooked.org website and I added a few other Twilight themed patterns.

That is how I became part of the Twilight Coven. I had Elizabeth contact me about one of my patterns and it just went on from there. While I didn't manage to make any blocks myself in the orginal "Quilt for Stephenie Meyer" it featured several of my patterns so I still feel part of that project. For our second group project, a New Moon themed quilt for charity, I was able to contribute a couple of blocks. I did the yellow porsche or "Grand Theft Auto" block which was also my own pattern and the "Paper Cut" pattern that was a modified version of a pattern by Jennifer Ofenstein from sewhooked.org. It was fantastic being part of the group. It's sometimes a bit harder for me to be part of online conversations as I'm generally 1/2 day ahead of everyone else in the group due to being the other side of the international date line, but I'm always made to feel part of the group.

I have several other personal quilting projects that are on the go at the moment, including a couple of Twilight themed ones, so hopefully I can have some more patterns available for people next year. I'm also expecting my first child next year, so I'm not sure how many projects I'll actually manage to finish for a while! Hopefully you won't have to wait too long for me to have other blocks available for you all to use.

Cat, aka hardhatcat