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dream job
Above: The reversible wrap
Ever stood entranced in front of a range
of mouth-watering fabrics, as if in a
sweetie shop, thinking about how you
could put them together?
Designer and teacher Monica Poole is no
different – she even dreams about quilt
and fashion designs and follows them up
the next day.
“I recently dreamt about a little
girl’s skirt – it had a pocket with frills
and a little A-line skirt with a frill
around the hem,” says the mum of
two teenagers who spends three days
a week teaching and the other two at
home working on designs. That dream
is now featured on one of her many
sewing patterns.
“I often dream about designs,
then I’ll source the fabric, come
to the studio and start cutting up
and drawing and
taking notes and
photographs,” says
Monica, who was
taught to sew as
a teenager by her
Mum and later went
on to study pattern
making and design
and worked as a
designer before her
daughter, now 18,
was born.
She is now
based on the Central Coast in NSW,
designing from her home studio,
and has a website: www.moonshinedesigns.com.
Monica loves cotton quilting fabric.
She uses it in most of her designs,
ranging from funky bags and colourful
reversible wrap skirts to quilts that
“I often dream about
designs, then I’ll source
the fabric, come to
the studio and start
cutting up and drawing
and taking notes
and photographs”,
says Monica
make you want to reach into your
stash and get sewing.
Her first book, Quilt As You Go - The
Moonshine Way, makes quilting even
easier. Often a problem for quilters
(novices and devotees) is they spend
so much time doing the creative stuff
– the patchwork and/or appliqué on
the top of the quilt – that finishing off
the quilt with batting, the back and
the binding seems a chore.
The technique of quilt as you go
– at the same
time as piecing
the top of the
quilt, you also
sew together the
three layers of
top, batting and
back so when
you finish all you
need to do is the
binding round the
sides - is by no
means exclusive
to Monica as
it’s been used by quilters all over the
world for generations.
But her designs using the
technique – sewing ‘trams’ of bias
strips with fusible web over the
exposed seams on the top of the
quilt - offer the possibility of throwing
together a quilt in just a day or
two. Yes, you’d have to spend the
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