Susan Brubaker Knapp is a fourth-generation quilter who made her first quilt in 1973 with her mother, a former home economics teacher. It was another twenty years before she made her second quilt, and caught the quilting bug for good. She was soon designing her own quilt patterns. Having worked in the fields of communications, journalism, and graphic design, Susan was well equipped to begin a pattern business when people started asking about her original designs. Her quilt patterns are now marketed under the name Blue Moon River and carried by several large pattern distributors. Since 2005, Susan has divided her time between traditional quilts, including lots of needle-turn appliqué, and art quilts. While her core materials - cloth and thread - are the same for both, she often employs nontraditional substances, such as fabric paints and dyes, Tyvek, Angelina fibers, and water-soluble wax pastels, to transform the cloth in her fiber art. Her quilts have won national as well as local awards, and have been exhibited at national and international venues. Susan is the author of Appliqué Petal Party: A Bouquet of 16 Quilt Blocks and Flowering Border by C&T Publishing (2009). Quilting Arts magazine ran her series of articles on thread sketching throughout 2010 and featured her in segments of Quilting Arts TV in 2009 and 2010. Her Quilting Arts DVD, Master Machine Quilting: Free-Motion Stitching and Thread Sketching, was released in 2009. She is an enthusiastic blogger, who enjoys connecting with quilters around the world through her blog, which can be accessed through her website, www.bluemoonriver.com. She also does presentations and teaches online, locally, and through quilting guilds across the country. Susan is a native of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, but now lives near Charlotte, North Carolina, with her husband and daughters.
