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Beach Houses

Let’s get to know Mickey, author of Mickey Lawler’s SkyQuilts!

What was your career prior to being an artist?
Wow, that’s going back a long way! I have been an artist/designer for the past 38 years. At one point in my young life, I was a high school English teacher and enjoyed it very much at the time.

Tell us about your first experience as an artist.
I was 8 years old. My mother asked me to “go upstairs and draw” my bath – which I did. It was a pretty funny drawing, but I certainly enjoyed making Mom laugh! After graduating from college with an “approved-of” degree in literature and philosophy (while all four years secretly envying the art majors), I immediately enrolled in an oil painting class – and haven’t stopped since.

What inspired you to make a career of your art?
It began with a quilt my grandmother gave my husband and me as a wedding gift. I tell people that, after the third of our three daughters was born (and guided by my grandmother’s quilt), I took up quilting “in self-defense” – as a creative pursuit that allowed me individual expression beyond that of mother and wife.

Then I began selling children’s quilts at craft fairs, soon took a part-time job in a fabric store, started teaching quiltmaking for my town’s adult education program, and within 4 years opened my own quilt shop. During those 10 years I made over 100 quilts, many of which were my own designs, and all of which were hand-quilted. I soon became enamored of creating landscape quilts, and finding no suitable fabrics available at the time, I began painting white cotton fabric to use as skies, water, and other scenic elements. Customers who came to my shop suddenly wanted to buy more of my painted fabrics than the commercial ones, so I sold my shop and inaugurated my business, SKYDYES, painting fabric for quiltmakers for the past 25 years.

How has your style changed over the years? 
In 1984 when I began painting fabric and subsequently selling my fabric, I only painted a few different skies because there were no sky fabrics for quilters on the market at that time. Within a few years, however, I realized the need for water, garden, and other landscape fabrics. All in all, the biggest change has come through years of trying to master the medium of putting textile paint on cloth! Learning, change, and growth keep me passionate about my work.

What’s your favorite aspect of your work?
My favorite aspect of painting fabric is the ritual, for lack of a better word. First, mixing the paints, testing the colors together, envisioning a painting. Then, the physical act of stretching the cloth and dampening the surface. Next, being “in the zone” of applying paint to the cloth in whatever way works for that day’s piece. Finally, even folding the dry, finished work is a pleasurable part, the sense that there are boundless possibilities for someone’s use of this fabric.

When I make quilts, my favorite part of this activity is plunging through my fabric to find the one piece that will inspire a new quilt!

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