Live in Studio with Emily Taylor

Right now it is 11 o'clock Monday, the 19th of September. I want to welcome you to my little show and I'm going to dive right in and share with you a little bit about what's been going on. We are supposed to have a guest on today and I sent her the link but I think she might have gotten the time zone wrong so she might pop in here and she might not. Either way, that's okay. That's just one of the things about doing a live video. The show must go on, right? I want to share with you just some... my grandma, she was 94, she just passed away this past week. I'm 50 years old so my grandma lived a lovely long life and she and I were very close so this has been a little bit of a challenge to lose my grandma. But I'm really excited about an upcoming project that I have. I see Dara just hopped on. Let me bring her actually. Dara, can you see me and can you hear me? Okay, I'm going to leave you muted for just a half a second and then I'll bring you live, okay? Anyway, so that's been going on in my... I have an upcoming project that I'm working on that I'm going to share. I'm just going to give you a quick glimpse. I'm not going to tell you what it is but I will just show you some of what is happening in the studio and part of the mess that you see behind me. These are some... as you know, Denmark is a Scandinavian country and so I've got these special little girls that are reminiscent of St. Lucy or St. Lucia. But clearly you can see this is going to be a Christmas project. There's another one out of you but just a little something about what's happening. I'm always posting behind the scenes photos or things that are happening behind the scenes or works in progress on my Instagram which is collage.quilter. So if you want to follow me on Instagram, collage.quilter is where to see projects that are in process. Okay, so thank you all for joining me. Thank you so much for the kind comments. I know many of you have already reached out and I really appreciate the well wishes and the thoughts at this time while we mourn the loss of my grandma. So I want to without further ado bring on Dara. I'm going to bring her live here. Remind me how to pronounce your name so I don't... you got it right, it's Dara. Okay, Dara, all right. So Dara is a quilter, you're a long arm quilter, right? Okay, long arm quilter and she's written a couple books that I want to share with you today and then I want to also talk about this program that she's doing about weight loss. So great. Okay, so when we met a few months ago, when was that? It was in July I think. Briefly met like seven years ago it was... issue with... yeah, I moved. Okay, so I'm going to while she's kind of working on her connection and making sure that it's up to speed, I'm going to introduce her books that we... I was really impressed with as I spoke to her at the International Quilt Show and she was explaining we actually have known each other for many years. We met many years ago while I was a designer for Riley Blake Designs and I believe that she was doing... Dara, I think you were doing samples for Riley Blake Designs, is that right? Yeah, so I've done a series... don't know why... it should be okay now. Okay. I am going to just carry things along so if you're buffering then... but what I want to do then is just I want to introduce these really awesome books that she has written because I was super excited about this and also I get a lot of questions about how do I quilt my projects. I have taken down my long arm machine and put it away. I've kept it but I've taken it down because I realized long arm quilting is just not... it's a guide that kind of walks you through everything about free motion quilting, how to get started. I love this book because it talks about the presser feet and bobbins and feed dogs and just the real basics, the nitty gritty basic question that everybody has if they want to get started with free motion quilting. And then it walks you through... the walking is the beginning part, then jogging is you're getting a little more confidence, and the run away go crazy wild is you have arrived. So I love it that this... I really love this book and I bought a few of them from you to make for sale. They're on collagequilter.com so they have some fun simple projects too. So like I wanted to... yeah, go ahead. Yeah, so I've got basic design, so you have your darning foot and then we go to... you learn cursive and so you're good and we go to loops and then we take you from where... then I help you increase so I don't even... I think that's one of the big quilting... was just in... I had a booth and it was so much fun. I teach the basic and then I give you five designs. So I'm having Dara and I'm having a really hard time hearing you consistently. I need to let me ask the viewers... if they're going to... it could be my connection. Folks, if you're joining us and you're watching this live, will you please let us know how this connection is because Dara, you're cutting out so much that I can't follow what you're saying. But I think I'm picking up that you're saying there's so much more to quilting... dang it, Dara, I'm so sorry. You know we've had this problem before with bad connections with my friends. I'm going to... oh, here's a second. Yeah, you keep working on your end and I'm going to talk about the next book too. So this book is an awesome basic beginner kind of walking through. And then here's another... she's a prolific author clearly, so she's got another book, two other books that I'm going to talk about. And again, all of these three books are on collagequilter.com because I just thought they were so useful for me to look at and kind of... I thought I'd share. When I've explained to my audience, to you folks, that when I quilt something, the way I quilt things is I do what's called doodle stitching in my mind. So I'll take, let's use this project as an example. My doodle stitching is I'm following kind of the design of the pattern and then in the negative space I'm doing a different kind of stitching. Okay, so I was super excited when I saw that she talks about doing that in the negative space or in different areas of the project. And you can see some of the stitching that I did down there was... so when I saw that I was like, oh this is fantastic. Okay, so these two books, Doodle School, talks about this doodle stitching concept so that you're learning about different ways to produce doodle stitching. Okay, and this is a really, really cool book. It talks about for example taking a motif and how to think about quilting it, doodling it with needle and thread. It just goes through everything. And then she's got... so we've got this book and then this is just kind of show about this book because I'm really excited about this. I think this is awesome. So for example, she will give us a prompt. Okay, think about the movement of water is what she says. How does water flow? Take a look at water images and she's got some prompts here for you. And then she's got in this little diary you can sketch yourself and just kind of practice. And here's another page. So I love this, that this is a book that's designed for us to actually get a pencil and draw in the book. So I think this is a workbook and I can't wait to play with this a little bit more. So those are the three books that I really wanted to point out to you that Dara is this professional quilter and I loved these books when I found them. So beginning, starting from the beginning learning how to free motion quilt, and then we've got kind of workbooks. This one I think is a good companion workbook. This one will kind of teach you those things and then this one really is like a diary that you can draw in. So people in Great Britain who are... Queen Elizabeth, yeah. So side note, I'm just looking at some of the comments. When the queen died last week we were sitting with my grandma and we told my grandma that the queen had died and my grandma was going through the dying process and we were like, Grandma, go now, now is your time to meet the queen. So anyway, I really hope that my grandma connects with the queen in heaven and says hello. Okay, so back to quilting. Let's see here. Dara, let's try one more time, okay? And if it doesn't work then we're just going to have to... I'm just going to have to... program for quilters to help them kind of lose weight, right? Like this was fascinating to me and I'm going to pull up your website right now. And let's see, it's Dara Thompson. I'm going to have Amelia pull that up and put it in the chat because Dara's got a really interesting program. So Dara, go ahead and let's see if we can... okay, it's darathomason.com and Amelia's going to put the actual link in there. There we go, it just showed up in the comments. So if you are a quilter that has maybe thought, oh I've... hear you. All right, oh. Can you hear me now? Oh, it's sketchy but let's try it. Okay, let me try one more. Headphones. Yeah, Dara, see if you have some headphones and let's... maybe headphones would help. Message my... here. I can... I know. Okay folks, sorry about that. I'm so sorry that she is breaking up. Passionate about staying fit and because I sit all day long in my studio, I always try to do a workout usually in the mornings. For me that's what works the best and I love to go to Pilates. I just did my Pilates class this morning and as I've gotten older, Pilates works really well for me because I had hip replacement last year and my joints just can't take a lot of... what's the word, Amelia? I have to be careful. I can't run anymore. I used to be able to run, I can't run anymore. And so Pilates works good for me to... five years ago, it's crazy. So I'm a big, huge believer in taking care of our bodies so that we can have the capacity to create and to serve other people. Okay, Dara, let's see if that helps us a little. Okay, we're going to try. What's going to work? Is that works better a little bit? Yeah, that's right. Tell us about your program. Okay, so my program... it's of yourself thin. Love yourself... oh, it's still not working. I am so sorry. Dang it. Program, it's called the 12-Step Perfection Recovery Program. Is that what it is? That's part of it. Okay, oh, Love Yourself Thin, that's the name of the program. Okay, so on Dara Thomason, the Love Yourself Thin program, and it's designed specifically for quilters. I'm a big believer in taking care of ourselves and loving ourselves enough to take care of our bodies so that we can accomplish what we want to as creators. Ultimately, creators do have a lot of sedentary time and we need to make sure... Love Yourself Thin and she also has a live retreat at... I don't know how to pronounce her name... Bonjian's Retreat Center. Okay, it's all about weight loss maintenance. So I invite you if you are interested in having some help from somebody that understands the challenges that are facing quilters and weight loss, Dara is the person to go to. She also has a podcast called Weight Loss for Quilters, but the name has just been changed to Love Yourself Thin. She also has 20-minute consults that are... so that you can schedule a... make sure that we include all of this information in the chat. Amelia, can you see the private chat that we have going with her? No, okay. I'm going to copy and paste this and put it in the chat. So now I want to get to some questions. Okay, so we always get questions in our comment section. So now's the time, folks. If you have questions about anything that we've talked about with free motion quilting, these resources that Dara has created are available on the collagequilter.com website. So we've got the Doodle... started with free motion quilting and kind of want to learn about it and then... the comments. Hey Dara, will you mute your microphone? We're getting a lot of the typing sound so we can't hear your voice but we're getting all the typing sound. I'll just take... okay. Oh, I'm sorry that this is so difficult. Let's see and then... if you have questions about quilting, if you have any questions about this project too, I also do just want to mention that we added a few more of the kits available. So let's go to questions and let me just go down the list as I see it and we're going to see if we have any questions that we can answer. Okay. Thank you so much everybody for the kind comments about my grandma. We have people joining us today from Georgia and Culver City, California, from Portugal, Anna from Portugal, and I saw we have somebody from North Wales. You aren't streaming to Collage Culture for some reason. Oh okay, well we'll fix that. Thank you so much. Now we have... I've got to remove... so I'm on my cell phone. Does that sound better? Yes, that's much better. Okay, and I can figure this out. Okay, so Dara, let's just have you do a quick... I would like to know how you got into how you kind of made the leap from quilting to weight loss. Yeah, so I'll just back out to the book. So just with the Walk Jog Run, it's the Bible. Like it will help you so much. It will... good student. And then in that as well, I have little work, so two minutes draw this, three minutes do this. Because when you can actually question and you don't do anything, so that book is just so... it's like you're taking a class with me and you're doing this and so that doesn't feel hard and challenging. So I love that book. And then the Doodles, the 30... I did it over 31 days and so when CNT Publishing... the Doodle School one. So when CNT was publishing... the prompt, I give you the application, I give you coaching on each one and I do that over 31 days. It's amazing into my brain and you see what's really going on because it is hard. How do they do that? So that's what I want to say. And then with the other book, The Companion, I give you the prompt like you were sharing, like the water one. And so you have six little squares and then you get rectangle, those two rectangles, and then you get two open pages that confidence like you can do this. And so I really do walk you through to... and the reason... so I cooked professionally for years and either quilts from across Canada and I was teaching quilting and I was really... and one of the reasons that I was able to get the teaching jobs and doing them because I had tools in my brain because I got myself a life coach. And our feelings all come from our thoughts. And so 95... if you're not sure of what you're thinking and you kind of start living on and you don't realize why you're getting all this weight or why you're not getting teaching jobs or what... you're not finishing projects or you... when I go to levels, I started losing weight. It was just a byproduct of being organized. And so I've lost 50 pounds without counting calories or exercising. And so adulting and people watching me on YouTube and they saw that I was shrinking... you need to help me with that. Okay, I really want to know what you're doing. And so it kind of came to be that I started sharing the things that I was doing to lose this weight. Yeah, I had such a demand for it that I decided to really serve my lane and how to think about our thinking. Said to your thinking, we need to have positive thinking, we need to have balance in our lives. I just keep going back to this idea that we want to increase our overall capacity for good and to be creative. We want to have the best relationships that we can and everything that we do is interrelated, right? So I think that our physical health is definitely related to our mental health and our mental health will impact everything else that we do. So it sounds like you've got kind of the whole package and your people are on top of it. It's the best. So it's like... if you have a messy and you don't deal with it by turning the lights off, you think okay but you still have to walk in your house so you're tripping and falling. So our lights on to start organizing what's going on. Like why is it so messy? It doesn't feel good to be there. And I help you organize all of that with those tools. Well, this sounds fantastic. So I am so excited that we were able to connect. I really apologize for the difficulty with connections. Technology, as we've said, can be amazing but it can be so frustrating sometimes. So I just want to... Dara, I'll contact you and we'll add some more but yeah, I want to just... it's probably about time to... I'm going to ask one more question. So I see one more question that I want to make sure we get to. It says, Dara, when we purchase the book, can we use the designs for our original art quilts that we enter in quilt shows ranging from local guild to maybe bigger shows? Only and I'm assuming that's yes. Absolutely, you're just teaching you the basics. Very own slant to do it for sure. Yeah, so she's teaching you the skill set and you apply that skill set to your own quilts and absolutely take everything that she... what are your thoughts if I use it versus light? Now this is for me. Yeah, would you highly suggest not using it? So folks, here's the thing. The Warm Company produces a couple different versions of Steam-a-Seam. If you get Steam-a-Seam or Steam-a-Seam 2 and it's not what I use. I use Light Steam-a-Seam 2. Don't worry about it, just use it. If you've got it, use it. It will be similar enough that you don't need to go out and buy more of the product. Use what you have and then when you're ready to restock, buy the Light Steam-a-Seam 2. The difference... I think that's all the questions that we have. And I like to just kind of keep this little show short. So I want to thank you all for joining us and Dara especially, thank you so much for being with us and I hope I get to see you at another show. Maybe in Houston. Are you going to be in Houston this year? Houston for the festival. Okay, great. Do you have a booth or are you teaching? I'm going to do a booth for this one. Okay, me too. I have a booth at Festival. So if you are going to the International Quilt Festival in Houston, that's November 3rd through the 6th, please come by my booth and Dara's booth and say hello. Okay, and we'll connect with each other there too.