John Dyck

My wife, Teri, has been sewing since the age of 8.  She sewed children’s clothing for our children, nieces and nephews and for charity.  Creating her own designs, she entered them in the Los Angeles County Fair for fun and enjoyment.  Of the 7 years she entered the Fair, she won the Sweepstakes Award for Clothing Construction 5 times.  

In 2005, she suffered a massive blood clot which prevented oxygen from reaching the brain.  She has lost a number of thinking skills as well as short-term memory.  She calls this new, disorganized thought process “Muddled Madness”. Not being able to do the fine detail work as before, Teri began making quilts.  The quilt designs first came to her as ideas that “wouldn’t go away” in the middle of the night.  During periods of the day when she was feeling well, she would sew a block or two until she finished a quilt.  This proved to be a good mental exercise to draw pictures of her ideas and to use the math required to calculate yardages and seam allowances.

This pattern line started when we gave some of her favorite quilts to a local charity and the lady asked her what pattern she used so she could make them herself.  With this in mind, I now take the finished quilts from my wife’s “muddled madness” and create the patterns.