I am LaVonne Jackson. I am a mother, grandmother, home designer and creator of quilts. I have degrees in architectural drafting and diagnostic ultrasonography. I still work as an ultrasonographer but my love and passion is creating and designing quilts and items related to quilting. I started sewing as a young girl and my first quilts were baby quilts. My dad would buy the fabric and put the fabric on  the frames he had built. My sisters and I would tie the quilts and hem them. We gave a quilt to every new baby in our area. The quilt that has the most memories was a hexi quilt I sewed using a sewing machine and then quilted by hand.    to your Pattern blog!  My mother had Huntington disease that led to her slowly degenerating and unable to function as the mom she once was. My father felt he had the responsibility to help me and my 2 younger sisters learn sewing, knitting, and other domestic skills. He would often learn the skill and then teach these skills to us. In my late teens, my father purchased a Grandmother’s Flower Garden quilt pattern.   

  He purchased all of the fabric and cut out the pieces. The pieces sat untouched for a few years. After I had 

been married a couple of years and was preparing to move across the country, I asked him if I could take the pieces and make the quilt. He said I could if I promised to finish it. I finished it and sent a picture to him with my first daughter and I holding the quilt. This quilt sat on my bed for many years. On Sunday afternoon it was the napping place for my children and of course my husband and I would also end up falling asleep.  Many other quilts were made after this quilt.  

   Through the years the sun coming through the window caused the threads to degrade. Many of the hexi’s had large holes. I purchased some fabric to try and repair it but after many moves and years of hauling the quilt around I decided to throw it away (big regret). In 2017 I thought I would venture into the world of English Paper Piecing (EPP) to attempt to make another hexi quilt to replace this quilt.  

  I spent hours working on the EPP hexi quilt. I love the look of EPP but for my busy life I thought there must be a way that is faster to produce the same look. With my background in design and architectural drafting, I came up with the idea to design a group of hexi stamps that are size compatible and could be used to create the look of EPP. I also designed stamp sets with other geometry. Because the stamps are a set, they can be used to make many different hexi quilt designs. The stamps use a permanent ink that does not bleed when washed and is acid free. Through teaching other quilt techniques I found a need for some other quilt templates. I first took the same shapes from the hexi stamps and made hexi templates and then went on to make other templates to benefit making other patterns I have designed. The templates work as well as the stamps they both have advantages but the templates are a more familiar tool to quilters.