A child of the 1960s, growing up in St Helens in the north of England, I've always been crafty - knitting, crocheting, and sewing from a very young age. By the 1980s, I was making padded shoulder blouses for my secretarial day job and the furnishings for my home. Moving south to Marlborough, Wiltshire, in the early 1990s, I set up an interior design company after encouragement from friends who wanted me to decorate and design their homes.

 

Busy creating family homes for others and concentrating on children's bedrooms and decorative murals, a chance encounter led to me designing home cinemas and entertainment suites for two of the founders of IMDb's movie website. After several years of travelling around the UK with my work, I decided to spend more time at home with my three young children - I wanted to make soup and bake bread and cakes! As my children grew, I took the opportunity to return to education and completed a foundation degree in Art & Design specialising in ceramics. I also studied Art & Design: Critical & Contextual Studies and found my attention turning to Textile Art, which led to one of the best purchases of my life - my much loved Bernina 440 QE sewing machine.

 

Moving to live in the States in August 2011, I left my studies behind and in October 2011, I discovered quilting which led in April 2012 to creating made by ChrissieD and starting to blog.

Why made by ChrissieD? Well, it's a play on my name combined with my nickname for my daughter.

View From My Roof Garden

 

Manhattan's backyard on the Hudson Riverfront at the Hoboken/Jersey City border was my home for six years. My husband, Simon and our two dogs, Thatcher the Havapoo (known as Tatty to her friends) and Watson the Havanese, were with me while our grown children went off on their adventures worldwide.

 

 During these initial six years in the States, I was a Bernina Sales/Store Assistant at The City Quilter in Chelsea, Manhattan, NYC. I moved into teaching quilting and sewing classes and private lessons/classes. Full details of all my upcoming and past courses are available here; I began working with several fabric companies and designed and wrote patterns for quilting magazines.   I was also VP (2016/17) of the NYC Metro MOD Quilters Guild and an individual member of the Modern Quilt Guild and the Quilt Alliance. I am proud to be the Quilt Alliance Quilters Take Manhattan 2016 Featherweight Champ of the Quilt World and a 2018 Designer for the International Association of Quilters. I was delighted to have been awarded the Top Blogger award by FaveQuilts.com yearly from 2016 to 2021. In my spare time 😉, I love being a Grandma to my Grandsons, Oliver and Noah, and visiting my children.


In 2016 I started my newsletter mbCD News, click the buttons below to access the mbCD News archive, and you can subscribe here also.



In July 2017, I moved to South Florida to begin a new life adventure.