Hi, my name is Tami Levin and I just recently moved to Vancouver, WA with my late husband Steve, who was a part of the internet revolution. I studied fashion design at Otis College of Art & Design (formerly Otis/Parsons) and English Lit at UC Santa Barbara. After a decade in the fashion industry (designing swimwear - mostly for juniors and missy, sometimes for children too) I'm now lucky enough to devote time on my artistic pursuits: a little doll-making but mostly quilt-making and quilting for others at my long arm quilting business, The Quilted Lemon. Of course our cairn terriers Fearghus, Fiona and Frankie (now over the rainbow bridge) also take up a lot of my time, the little terrierists.
I've been sewing since I was a little girl. My grandmother taught me a lot of things - how to wing a pattern from newspaper, how to make binding, and how to use what you had in your stash. And my mom taught me how to embroider. She also enrolled me in a sewing class when I was in grade school. Ah, if only you could see the little calico print blouse that I made. It even had pearl snaps on it.
My first quilt was made for my aunt's baby shower when I was 12 or 13. It was part of my home-economics class in junior high school. I insisted that it be fluffy so I used a super high loft batting. Machine pieced but hand-quilted. You could tell that I was young because I used unicorns and pegasuses as the corner quilting designs. Apparently my little cousin loved that quilt until it fell apart. I made my first doll many, many years later when I was at college. It was a present for one of my sisters. I'm not even sure if she still has it, but I had a lot of fun making it.
Since then I've been collecting doll patterns and slowly dipping into them. Fifteen years ago I met fellow doll-makers for the first time and have been having a ball ever since. Now I spend most of my time quilting and am a member of three different quilt guilds but occasionally a doll just begs to be made.Most of the quilts that I made were either baby quilts or wall hanging quilts but I've branched out and began making bigger ones. While we were in Cheyenne, WY (for 1 1/2 years for Steve's work) I began taking longarm classes and rental time in Fort Collins, CO. Once we moved back to CA I bought my very own longarm quilting machine, an APQS Freedom that I call Freddie. He also has a robotics system (IntelliQuilter) on it so that I'm cooking with fire so to speak.
My favorite colors (right now, this changes all the time) are: turquoise, aqua, cobalt blue, yellow, purple, sometimes red (but mostly only for cars) and of course, GREEN. When I was a kid the crayola crayon that I used first was blue green (sniff - I'm sad to say that color has since been retired).
Oh, and the reason why I chose the name Lemon Tree Tales is because I had a very nice lemon tree in the backyard of our house in CA. (And lemon trees make me smile!) So now I look for lemon print fabrics whenever I get a chance. There's just something about a bright yellow that's so cheerful.
Thanks for dropping by Lemon Tree Tales.
