Tom and I have a request for you. Preparing this post he noted that for the first time in years we are running low on submissions of finished fabric collage quilts to share in our Finish Line posts! So for the new year we hope you will consider sending in photos of your work to appear here in the upcoming months.
Tom’s got all the particulars clearly spelled out in our Fabric Collage Finish Line Submission page. Some nice photos of your work sent as large images, and writing as much of a story as you can make of the image and process would be much appreciated. If by chance, you sent a submission last year and have not seen it yet in a post, it may be the photos were too small or dark or otherwise did not do your quilt justice—Tom may have tried to get ahold of you. In any case, he’s always available to answer anyone’s questions at: [email protected].
Ready to share your fabulous collage creations? Click on button below—thank you to all!
Submit Quilt for "Finish Line"
In today’s post we have a potpourri of fabric collage (plus Something Completely Different) lined up for you. Finish Line #118 will warm and brighten your day with the colorful and gorgeous artwork of Mary McKay, Kiyomi Carter, and Cher Olsson—such as “The Siblings” by Cher, photo above.
All three have not only shared their lovely quilts with us, but have given us great insights into their creative processes—don’t we all like to know the whys and hows of images such as these? Thank you, ladies.
After you oooh and ahhh over those finished collage quilts, be sure to check out info I’ve added about our upcoming Glorious Gecko February Follow Along. I’m getting my New Year’s creative flow going as I prepare a new sample gecko for the workshop beginning on February 5th.
And finally, I invite you to join me as I take you through an icy morning photo gallery as I gazed in awe at newly formed hoarfrost. Very cool. 😉
Mary McKay
I love this portrait quilt that Mary McKay created of her daughter and her daughter’s family dog, Strider. As Mary describes below, it was an epic journey, but what a perfect ending. Here are the four posts that cover the in-progress saga of “Strider and Friend”—October 2023 Live Online Fabric Collage Class Part 1; Whoa, Nellie! Fabric Collage Returns to Cowboy Country, Pt. 1; Live Online Class—Part 2: The Return of Susan’s Angels; and Alegre Retreat 2024 Part 2—A Banquet of Fabric Art.
From Mary McKay of Palm Desert, CA:
Strider is my daughter’s dog. He is way too smart for a dog and he is a snuggle bug. I enjoyed making it and learning about where colors can be repeated and where they can’t. Working through the shadows on her neck area was the most challenging and time consuming.
I worked on it independently and with coaching, in an online class and in two in-person classes. I work slowly and have almost internalized that the first draft is really not even the halfway mark. Susan is a tremendous teacher who consistently demonstrates patience while giving encouragement. She has an uncanny ability to talk you through whatever pesky issue is raising its colorful little raw edge.
Kiyomi Carter
Since submitting this fish collage, Kiyomi and her friend Marci did attend my September 2025 Bar Harbor class that she mentions in her comments. To see the gob-smacking direction her collage work (as well as Marci’s) took, click on these post links: Immersing into Fabric Collage 2025: Bar Harbor, Maine—Part 1; and MISA in Bar Harbor, Maine—Wrap-Up.
From Kiyomi Carter of Chapel Hill, NC:
I wanted to learn the process of collage quilting, so my friend Marci and I went to Paducah in the fall of 2024 to view Susan’s work at the NQM. We were inspired, so signed up for Susan’s 2-week Bar Harbor class for Sept 2025. In order to get some practice with the technique, we worked through the spiral exercise, then got the online Fantastical Fish workshop. It was a great way to view the videos as we worked, being able to stop and go back as we worked.
We got together every Sunday afternoon from February to July to work on our fish projects using Susan’s patterns, and loved the process. It made us view fabrics in a totally different way than we were used to. Of course we probably made all the mistakes and did things the hard way! We thoroughly enjoyed working together on our respective fish collage, and we’re looking forward to our class in September. Making a collage fish of “manageable size” was a great way to get our feet wet!
Click on any smaller photos to view images larger and to scroll through gallery.
Cher Olsson
Cher has an accomplished artist’s eye in depicting her subjects in fabric collage—from their soulful eyes to their pudgy little toes. Before attending the January 2022 Live Online Fabric Collage Class—Part Two: Crazy Fur Sure, where she began her furry trio featured below, she collaged an adorable portrait, “Pugsley is a Girl,” featured in this post: Fabric Collage Finish Line No. 77. What a pleasure it is to see her finished work.
From Cher Olsson of Surrey, BC, Canada:
Inspired by seeing Susan’s quilt, Tickled Pink, I bought her book. I really wanted to learn how to do collage. I read all her blogs, watched her Patreon posts, purchased her master class and was able to take an online class in January 2022. “The Siblings” was started in that class with Kona on the left.
I learned so much and loved the online format. I intended the gift to be for my friends 50th birthday but when I found out Zoe (the cat) was sick, I worked on it everyday to get it finished so I could have a photo of the three of them with the quilt.
In the last two years the quilt has been published twice and hung in a quilt show and an art gallery show, winning some awards and becoming very loved by all who see it. It’s now retired and hanging in its home where it belongs. Now on to mastering faces! Susan and Tom, thank you for all you do to make sure we all have the best opportunity to learn how to make our own collage quilts.
Watcha doing in February?
For the past couple years, I’ve come up with a “Follow Along” project for the month of February, to warm up our creative juices. I chose “Fantastical Fish” both years—2024 had a focus on how to use big and bold print fabrics in a fabric collage (which has since been turned into the “Fantastical Fish eWorkshop,” and in 2025, a “Blue Goldfish” dealt with light-to-dark values of one color.
This year I reached back to a subject and pattern I haven’t worked with for awhile, though quite fun when I did—a gecko—a “Glorious Gecko” (I do like alliteration). A major question I’ll be thinking about as I prepare for this workshop is, “what makes a gecko glorious?”
I’ll take you from one Thursday to the next for 4 weeks—from pattern to fabric t0 pinning and gluing, from background to (gloriously) sparkly details. All the while I chat away describing my thought process at each step. The idea is that you hang out on your end, ask questions and take in what I’m doing, then if you can and so desire, you work on your own gecko. I give you homework every week, then we pick up with the next step in the fabric collage process, for the month of February.
There’s no requirement that you do anything—life is busy—the weekly presentations are recorded and sent to your email box and will be available to follow another week, month, or year from now. The idea is that for a couple hours every Thursday in February, you get to sit back with your feet up, relax, listen, and watch while I’m working live on a new collage. We’ll see what happens. Gonna join me?
See more info below. But first a comment from my amazingly accomplished student, Grace Crocker:
Susan’s “Follow Alongs” are so much fun. They are a perfect way to learn the process if you are a newbie and a great way to improve your skills, if you’ve been around for a while. Looking forward to this one!
Glorious Gecko Follow Along for February 2026
If you’re looking for a fresh and creative start to the New Year, here’s a step-by-step low-stress way to learn the fabric collage technique. Each Thursday for the 4 weeks in February, I’ll be playing with fabric using a playful subject—a gecko. Geckos come in all sizes, colors, and patterns, which means anything goes. If you’ve been wanting to “cut loose and let go,” here’s your chance.
Susan Carlson Glorious Gecko Follow Along
February 5, 12, 19, and 26—7:00 p.m. EASTERN TIME
Cost: $95
REGISTER HERE
Typically each evening presentation (7 pm Eastern Time) runs about an hour and half. As with all our Thursday Night sessions, a recording link will be emailed the next evening to all registrants to review or watch later if you cannot join us live.
Each week via Zoom, I’ll be giving a live demo with Q&A as I gradually take you from beginning to end of a Glorious Gecko collage. You are invited to “follow along” if you wish, or you may simply want to watch as my piece progresses. I start off with a slide show to get you caught up on the progress I’ve made the previous week, I then work live as I progress to the next step, talking through my thought process and creative decisions while demonstrating the technique.
As a registrant you will receive a code for a free gecko pattern from my online shop to follow along as you play with your own fabric stash—but you are welcome of course to use your own gecko design, or just “go with the flow” of your fabric. In between the Thursday sessions, you can apply the steps covered to your own gecko collage.
And Now for Something Completely Different
Here’s a vocabulary word to finish the week: hoarfrost. Are you familiar with it? Probably 20 or so years ago I first saw this peculiar, distinct, and beautiful frost of fine hairs of ice that seemingly stand on end. It covered every branch and surface along our driveway and had me captivated. At first I didn’t know it had a name. But over the years I heard or read (maybe in a novel) the word hoarfrost, and I just knew it was what I had seen. Here’s a good definition of hoarfrost.
And that’s what I woke up to yesterday. As I crossed the deck to feed popcorn and peanuts to “my” crows, something about our frosty morning looked different—I first noticed that a scrap metal dog sculpture looked “furry.” Unfortunately for the murder of cawing crows lurking in the tall trees, I set down their breakfast basket while I took some photos of this rare and ethereal occurrence. From one object to the next, it was an intricate wonder to behold.
I’ve shared a few of my hoarfrost photos below. I set them up as a single gallery so you can click on one and scroll through all the enlarged photos—the only way to really see the delicacy of this winter fringe of ice. So cool how it attached to and surrounded the variety of surfaces—the round “ornament” is a peach that shriveled on its branch before ripening last summer—transformed by the frost.
It took awhile before the crows got their food—but they did. I caught one of them in flight over the frosty field.
