With just the third quilt she’d ever made, self-taught quiltmaker Kim Diehl entered and won American Patchwork & Quilting magazine’s “Pieces of the Past” quilt challenge in 1998. This win took her life down a new and unexpected path, and with her fourth quilt, Kim began publishing her original designs. In the years since her challenge win, Kim has seen her work published in numerous national and international magazines.
With her new-found hobby quickly blossoming into a career, Kim realized that she needed to complete her quilts more quickly to meet her ever increasing deadlines. Although she loved using traditional needle-turn methods to hand stitch her applique designs, Kim began experimenting with invisible machine applique. She soon developed a technique that enabled her to machine-stitch her appliques in a fraction of the time, and she was delighted to find that they had the appearance of being hand sewn -- Kim has seldom needle-turned a seam since!
In 2004, Kim began partnering with Martingale & Company to share her "tradition with a twist" quilting designs and time-saving techniques through her books. To date, she's authored four titles in her best-selling “Simple” series, and her fifth book, Simple Graces, is currently in the works and due for release in November of 2010.
The opportunity to begin designing fabrics for Henry Glass in 2008 enabled Kim to combine her love of richly-hued prints with her “scrap-basket” approach to quiltmaking, and her designs reflect this. “My goal is for my fabric designs to work together beautifully without looking as though they were created together. What could be more fun than designing a quilt, and then creating the fabrics to bring it alive?” This endeavor has been especially rewarding for Kim, because she has no formal artistic training and she loves seeing where her natural instincts lead her.
