For nearly twenty years, I have been designing patterns for quiltmaking, mostly applique but a few patchwork patterns, too. Before that, I was a child care provider, an early childhood educator, a curriculum writer, and even had a short-term job illustrating a book for the forest service. If you look at my patterns, you'll see that my love of children has influenced my work. So has my love of animals and nature.
If I could live and work outdoors 24/7, I probably would. But I live in the rainy Pacific Northwest of the US and that just isn't practical, unless I wanted to go into the mud pie business (which I don't). We don't get a whole lot of rain, really, only 40 inches annually which is similar to many other geographic regions. But unlike those other areas, here the rain usually takes its own sweet time coming down. It could rain all week here and the grand total might be as much as a scant 1/4 inch, the same measurement that quilters are abundantly familiar with.
Rain is so common here that it's euphemistically called "liquid sunshine" because sometimes it seems like it's the only way we'll get any sunshine. One night as I was trying to think of a business name for my pattern design adventure, the rain decided to come down fast enough that I could hear it pelting the roof. I wondered what those big, fat raindrops would be called in terms of liquid sunshine and thought, "sundrops...they'd be called sundrops!"
As you've probably guessed by now, I liked the word so much that I used it in my business name, Sundrop Designs. And I've had a lot of fun incorporating the raindrop shape into many of my designs. Later, I learned that there's a wildflower native to the Rocky Mountains named sundrop, and there's a soda pop in the southern states named SunDrop, and quite a few little league teams with SunDrop in their names somewhere. But I still meet a lot of people who, like me, had never heard of sundrops.
Sundrop Designs Blog: the musings of a quilter and pattern designer
