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Ellyn Zinsmeister & Catherine Dutton
Your Creativity Ambassadors!
Hi Friends! We are Catherine & Ellyn!
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.
We decided quickly that we wanted to understand creativity more. 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've learned so much and we are looking forward to what we can learn from the next round of interviews!
Meet Ellyn
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
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!
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