About Us

Ellyn Zinsmeister & Catherine Dutton

Your Creativity Ambassadors!

Hi Friends! We are Catherine & Ellyn!

Ellyn may not remember this, but we met the first time at a quilt shop in McKinney, TX. Ellyn was working and she told me about a modern quilt guild that met at the shop each month. I decided to check it out and we got to know each other through the quilt guild activities. At some point, we started meeting for weekly art days together and well, that was the start of a wonderful friendship.

As we would make art together, we shared our lives and talked about deep stuff.... like being creative and our processes. We'd make plans for new projects and try different techniques together. We've gone on creative field trips together and brunch is almost always involved. Somewhere in there, we started talking about how awesome it would be to have a space to make art in many forms with our friends and to meet new friends....and thus the Remix and Stitch Lab started to form.

We decided quickly that we wanted to do a creative retreat but we also wanted to really understand creativity more. If we were going to hold a retreat on creativity, we'd better be experts on the topic, right? So in fall 2024, we started a podcast, Creative Crossroads, were we interview people who are creative in their world- the first season focused on "visual creatives" specifically, artists using oil, fiber and/or mixed media. We learned so much and met some truly wonderful people... including Dori Patrick! After Ellyn and I interviewed her, we stayed on Zoom and both looked at each other.... we HAVE to invite her to join us for this retreat! And then things got even more fun, and even more real.

We hope you'll consider joining us at Remix and Stitch Lab. We want this to be a time of inspriation, joy, creativity, and renewal. We all need time to escape the world we're in and what better way to do so in a beautiful, rural setting, away from it all where you can laugh and make with other creative, joyful people?

Meet Ellyn

Ellyn Zinsmeister is a fiber artist living in Allen, Texas with her husband and cheerleader, Rick. She loves weaving on a rigid heddle loom and improv modern quilting the most, but is willing to explore all kinds of creative mediums.

Ellyn loves collaboration and her group quilts have won many awards, including ribbons at Quiltcon, the annual international convention of the Modern Quilt Guild. Her work has also been published in Quiltcon, Curated Quilts and Simply Moderne magazines. She is a founding member of the Quilts Unscripted Bee and the McKinney Modern Quilt Guild. These two places are where she has found her creative community.

Ellyn’s work features bright saturated colors, primarily solid fabric, quirky improv piecing and a large dose of joy. She loves words on quilts and big stitch accents. Teaching and encouraging other artists delights her. She finds she learns as much from her students as they learn from her.

Meet Catherine

Catherine Dutton lives in Princeton, TX with her sister, Alice and three cats- Freya, Ned and Cas. She has been an avid quilter for over 25 years but has focused more on watercolor painting and mixed media art during the past few years.

For Catherine, much of her creativity focuses on process....meaning she doesn't have a lot of completed projects, but she loves playing with different techniques. However, she has had quilts shown at QuiltCon, an international modern quilt show and at several local shows where she's even won a couple of ribbons!

When Catherine isn't making a mess in her art studio, she's a professor in Human Development & Family Sciences at Texas Woman's University where she integrates creativity into all of her teaching and research. She loves learning and sees life as one giant hands- on research project. There is so much to learn and we learn best by trying it out!

2025 Special Guest Teacher: Dori Patrick

Meet Dori

Dori Patrick feels very fortunate to live a creative life in Cedar Rapids, Iowa where she resides with her husband and rescue Labradors. She owned a storefront for 12 years in downtown Marion, Iowa called The Dreaming Bear. It was a make and take art studio space where she hosted creative workshops and parties, as well as community outreach projects with organizations such as The Arc and Foundation 2. She eventually closed the door on those special memories to venture out on her own artistic journey. Dori is a full-time mixed media artist who works in acrylics, graphite, pastel, and collage. Her studio space is now at home, where she enjoys the freedom to explore many ideas. You name it, she’ll try it! She works on a variety of surfaces including canvas, wood, and fabric. She has a passion for art journaling & altered books as well and loves to share the therapeutic benefits of this practice with others. You will often see messages of encouragement in her work, sometimes obvious, sometimes not. And sometimes snarky, with a touch of humor! With a passion for color and texture, her work is often described as exuberant, childlike, and joyful. But those who look a little deeper will see an intuitive, unguarded approach, along with a desire to put some good back into this broken world.

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