Jane Haworth will be teaching two hand work classes during Road@Home, both on Saturday, January 23rd:

S104 – Succulent Love Fabric Collage from 8:00 AM – 11:00 AM

S119 – Pink Cosmos Fabric Collage from 1:30 PM – 5:30 PM

A Crafty Lady

All of Jane Haworth’s life, she has either been making crafts, knitting, stitching, spinning, or weaving. After studying textile design at college in England, Jane sewed industrially for Laura Ashley and then worked with interior designers making soft furnishings. She moved to California in 1998, bought a sewing machine and continued to sew but it took about 3 years before she became aware of quilting.

Jane Haworth self-taught herself with her crafts and so when it came to learning how to quilt, she turned to library books or watched Simply Quilts that she recorded. It didn’t take Jane long to start making her own designs. After watching Susan Carlson with Alex Anderson on Simply Quilts, the option of raw-edge fabric collage caught Jane’s attention. Says Jane, “I think this freeing form of collage appealed to me and I was quickly trying to make photos from a Hawaiian vacation in fabric. I have since explored using this technique on various themes and design all the patterns myself.”

Creating at Home

For the past three years, Jane has been creating in a small area in her home. She used to work in her master bedroom where she still stores all of her fabric. Jane says her sewing space is actually the “formal living room.” It is directly off the front entry, so she needs to keep it neat and tidy.

Her sewing machine space looks out to the front of her property and behind it is her design wall. The dining room for the house is conveniently placed right off her sewing area where she does most of her cutting and now my Zoom presentations.

Jane Haworth’s “must have” tools for doing her fabric collages include he Karen Kay Buckley 6” perfect scissors, (Jane notes that once she discovered those scissors, she couldn’t believe what a difference they made to free cutting fabric), Aleenes Tacky glue and a school glue spreader that she first bought from a school supply store. Jane stiches on a JUKI 2010Q that is semi industrial. It reminds her when she was using an industrial sewing machine at Laura Ashley. Jane commented that “It is great for free-motion quilting and stitching custom T-shirt quilts, that I do a lot.”

Life During COVID

Since last March, Jane relates that she has “been as busy as ever and still have not found time to work on the UFO’s that I thought I would.” A lot of time has also been spent developing or adapting her classes for teaching online which includes making new samples. Jane put together an “on-demand workshop” called Love of Pets Fabric Collage. This was her most popular class but it doesn’t really fit an online format because there is too much one-on-one teaching involved. Jane also made hundreds of masks for a local care service, neighbors, and a local restaurant.

The life lessons Jane Haworth has learned during the lockdowns is “that family is important even if they are not close by. My mum and siblings and are all in England and I missed my yearly visit this year, but we have started a bi-weekly video chat that we never did previously. I am also very grateful that I have a comfortable place to live, my kids are grown and my son doing high school at home can work independently.  I can now work 8 hours a day on my sewing with fewer distractions.”

Teaching During Road@Home

An experienced quilt teacher, this will be Jane Haworth’s first-time teaching with Road to California. Jane has been teaching quilt classes for about 6 years. The first classes she taught were kids sewing and art quilting at her local sewing store. She has taught classes to her quilt guild and local quilt store. Her teaching has expanded to quilt guilds throughout the United States and at national quilt shows and festivals. Last February, she was invited to teach at the Dubai International Quilt Festival which Jane said, “was an incredible experience.”

Jane is looking forward to sharing her technique which she feels is “a little more freeing than other fabric collage techniques. It opens the eyes to students to try something new and hopefully make them feel that they can work and create out of their comfort zone.”

Jane likes teaching from home for the online Road@Home. She said it gives her “more opportunities to share more techniques including using scraps and found textiles in their projects, painting on fabric and designing their own patterns from photos” while having easy access to all her quilts, samples and materials.

To learn more about Jane Haworth, please visit her website.

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