Member Artist

The guild members have selected Jan Yancey as our Featured Member Artist for the 2025 show.

Jan's Quilting Journey:

I was quite young when I started sewing, learning the basics from my mother who was a professional tailor. In my early adult years, I put my skills to work sewing practical things - T-shirts, shorts and batman capes for 4 little boys. When my girls came along, I added prom dresses, wedding dresses and blessing gowns to my “been there, done that” list. Oh my! There are a LOT of crazy things on that list! Puppets, parachutes, and recently, I made a bandolier that will hold 24 cans of beer for a wedding reception! If it can be imagined, I can make it.

Somewhere in all that craziness and in the process of raising 6 kids, I became interested in oil painting. There were very few resources in our little town back in those days, so I am a self-taught artist. My skills grew quickly, becoming experienced enough to teach. I ended up teaching decorative painting for over 25 years. I received a Certified Decorative Artist (CDA) certification from the National Society of Deco-rative Painters in 1993 and was invited to paint a Christmas tree ornament for the White House that same year. My favorite style of painting is Rosemaling … a folk-art style of painting with roots in Norway dating back to the early 1700’s. Rosemaling uses lots of teardrop-shaped strokes called comma strokes. There can be hundreds of them in a painting.

Fast forward to quilting … the very first time I set out to quilt feathers mine were nearly perfect! I said “WHAT?? I thought they were supposed to be hard to do.” It eventually dawned on me that I’d been practicing feathers as comma strokes with a brush and paint for over 25 years. This was my “hello painting… meet quilting” moment! Rosemaling almost always appears in my quilting in one form or another now. They are a perfect match. As an interesting side note, my mom’s genealogy has roots very close to those now famous areas where Rosemaling originated.

I brought many skills from painting with me into quilting. These include a working under-standing of unity, variety, line, shape, space, balance, color, movement, white space, texture, proportion and scale. These are all well-known principles of design and I have found they are just as important in quilting as they are in painting. I believe these extra “tools” in my sewing box give my quilting a little something special. You might not be able to name all these things in my quilts but many people say they just see something different there. For all these reasons and more, I only do free motion quilting. I must have the untethered, creative freedom that comes with it. So, no programmed patterns for me!

I don’t paint a lot these days but I play a little with water-colors. I do, however, often go back to my painting roots to solve many design problems. If I can’t find the perfect sunset fabric or ocean background, well, I just paint some. Designing quilts takes a lot of courage to put yourself out there to be judged. It’s always a wild ride but I love it!