2103 New Year celebration Blog Hop: Flying with Emerald Green

January 11, 2013 

 Let's Fly Blog Hop !


Welcome everyone!

You are most likely visiting my blog after viewing 
Annette Plummer's lovely blog from the UK.

Now that you are all warmed up with so much inspiration I hope you will relax and enjoy your time here with me.

I am Dawn of Dawn Rae Conery designs.  I live in Bangor, Maine USA and enjoy designing patterns for textiles as well as creating and designing quilting patterns, painting with watercolors and drawing with pen and ink.

My love affair with color, design and fabric began as a youngster and led to an entrepreneurial dream realized when I opened my retail quilt shops and Bernina sewing machine dealerships,  Cotton Patch Quilts in Maine and then later Sun Valley Quilts in Arizona. Having sold both shops I now have the time and freedom to focus on my design career. Currently I create quilting patterns for Fabri-quilt and Paintbrush Studio USA, a fabric company and also sell a few with an online wholesaler, Quiltwoman.com.  


Living most of the year on a beautiful lake in Maine supplies me with much of my artistic inspiration.  Flowers, trees, critters and sunsets abound with colors and shapes that I love to bring to life in my art.

Emerald green is the perfect color choice for the Pantone color of the year 2013 and I found it joyful to use in these new designs of flying dandelion seeds, dragonflies at night and lush grassy stripes. I hope you enjoy them!

                                Dandelions and Dragonflies

My career goals for this new year are to pursue freelancing and licensing opportunities for textiles, home goods and/or stationary products. 
 I continue to learn and grow as an artist with daily art-ventures using paints, pen and ink and my computer.  With design programs like Adobe Photoshop and Illustrator 6 I plan to build my portfolio of designs.  
 I will also create more quilting patterns and fabrics for that booming industry with a focus on a modern simple style. Having sold 3 lines of quilting fabrics in the past I am encouraged to design and license many more.

Building the Dawn Rae Conery Design brand will keep me busy and happily moving forward for a long time.

Please contact me anytime at : dawnraes04401@yahoo.com if you would like to know more about me or my designs.

Thank you so much for taking the time to view my designs and read about my dreams and goals.  I hope our paths cross one day.

I encourage you to visit Licorice Love/Sylvia T. Designs blog for more fun and inspiration!

Thank you so much for curating this awesomeness Rosie Martinez-Dekker!

My Words for 2013

Peace and Contentment

These words were not the first I chose.  My first was Courage, but I was afraid to choose it.  

You see, for most of my adult life I have had to seek and practice courage.  And it has worked for me, yes it has, a lot.  But it is so darn hard!  

Courage helped me grow from a somewhat quiet and shy girl, into a strong and independent woman.  It helped me leave a 17 year marriage to a man I loved and the father of my 2 children because of his serious and worsening mental illness.  Courage saw me through raising these 2 teenagers alone and beginning my entrepreneurial dream of owning my own quilt shop. 
 Four years later , Courage held me up when making the decision to leave my family behind in Maine and with a new husband move across the country to Arizona to make a new life and open a new store.  
Starting a business from scratch takes so much energy and courage, putting one foot in front of the other and making decisions along the way that you never had to make before in your life. 
I taught myself to teach classes, never having taken a class in quilting myself!  I hired staff, stocked the store, implemented procedures, built and installed fixtures, wrote ad campaigns, spoke to large groups of quilters in many communities for feedback, used a microphone! to speak to them, sometimes over 200 women at a time!  Courage lead me to take on a Bernina sewing machine dealership and become one of the top 5 dealers in my district and win awards. I learned to create patterns and fabric lines that sold to shops around the world. I grew that shop into a large and wonderful place that still exists with a new owner 10 years later.
Courage helped me to sell the shop, leave that husband and a lot of personal unhappiness so I could return to my home state of Maine and my family, heal and begin again.

That was almost 3 years ago. 

That's when I decided what I really wanted was Peace and Contentment.
And I found it.

I found it where I began, with the people that I love, with my wonderful husband who supports me and loves me and lets me be who I am.  I found it on the lake that we live on in the summers, and on our trips in the motor home in the winters, and in the home that I bought on the street where I grew up.  

I found it in my creativity, my art, my painting and my drawing, my designing.  Peace and Contentment requires Courage.  But instead of the drive and striving of courage, there is an ease.  

I told my husband when I met him that all I wanted was Peace and Contentment.  And like I just described, I have found it.  But...

I am not finished.  There is more.  I have so many goals still.  I am "retired" in the way that I don't have to go to work everyday anymore.  But there are new horizons and things to do, fabrics to design, patterns to create, paintings to paint, words to write!

Now that I have Courage under my belt I can relax in Peace and Contentment and confidently move forward.  

For this next year, I will create and absorb these words into my life.  I am so excited and grateful !

Life is what you create.

Thank you for taking the time to read these words about my life and my dreams.  

Happy New Year and much love to you.

If you click on the link below you can visit more flyers and read inspirational stories about their word of the year.  Enjoy!



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Traveling the back roads in Maine, during the autumn, season  is an awesome experience.  Gets the creative stuff flowing! 
A trip to the apple orchard to collect cider (we are making hard cider again this year!) and then a trip to the antique store in a small village is nothing short of inspiring.  Got some great old books on design and drawing.  Love books! 
Hope you all had a wonderful day too :)

My very first post...

It is fitting that it should be today, the first day of Autumn.   For me the most beautiful time of year.  

 

 

Tinges of color have sprung up almost overnight on the lake that I call home much of the year.  The view from my studio, where I now sit, is inspirational, every day!

 

I have to tell you, however, that the greatest inspiration I have received  in a long time has been from a group of incredible people from around the world who join me everyday on an e-course called "Flying Lessons"  hosted by artist Kelly Rae Roberts.  Without their support and encouragement, I would  never have dared to create a blog.  But here I am! 

 

They make me brave!