Joy Duke - Mid-Appalachian Quilters

Website: Joyous Applique Designs

Joy Duke is a designer, teacher, and lecturer for Joyous Appliqué Designs. She has always enjoyed playing with textural fabrics since, as a small child, she attended sewing lessons with her mother in the 70’s. Her first quilt was a crazy quilt that was made as a school project in the early 80’s which got her out of having to write a research paper – now that was a deal! Joy has always enjoyed working with needle and thread and learned crewel embroidery, counted-cross stich, and finally she returned to quilting as a young newlywed. In those days applique was referred to by her quilt guild friends as the “A Word” and Joy proclaimed that she would NEVER do applique.

Well 100+ patterns later we all know that Joy was wrong about never “doing applique”. In 2012, Joyous Applique Designs was born with 5 original patterns and Joy hasn’t stopped designing and teaching since. All of Joy’s patterns are ones that can be stitched within a reasonable time frame – no year-long or life-long creations here. Joy wants her students to have fun and see real progress each time they pick their work up to stitch. Fusible applique using cotton fabrics were where Joy started and then she added yo-yos to her patterns to add additional texture and bring yo-yos back into the spotlight. These project types are very portable for hand stitching and allow you to stitch wherever you may go. Joy’s latest passion is bamboo felt applique which is very similar to wool applique, but allows those that are allergic to wool, or that don’t have the budget for wool, to create beautiful fun pieces of art.

In addition to designing, teaching, and lecturing for guilds, Joy has been published in an online magazine and now writes how-to articles for QuiltingHub.com as one of the Quilting Contessas.

When Joy is not stitching, she enjoys going to the beach and spending time with her family, sometimes she is even found stitching on the beach or around a competition swimming pool. She meets the nicest people when stitch in public and their comments lead her to one of her lectures and trunk shows where she shares the funny things that people have told her while she stitches in public.