Julie Golimowski

Julie Golimowski
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Julie Golimowski

"Every time I design a fabric line, it's because I can't find something that I've been looking for," explained fabric designer Julie Golimowski.Her very first fabric collection was called Material Resources.Initially, it featured just building materials such as bricks, wood textures and even pebbles.She created basically everything you could possibly need to build a house or in Julie's case, a cottage, out of fabric.She later added Landscape Materials to her Material Resources collection, featuring outdoor elements such as water, grass and sky.This collection was such a hit that they were kept available to quilters for nearly four years.Not too shabby for a first-time designer!

As a quilt shop owner on the coast of Oregon, Julie had discovered that the bulk of her clientele were tourists.In order to keep in touch with her customers over slow and rainy winter months, Julie started up block-of-the-month programs that her customers could participate in by mail.Flower garden blocks and English cottage quilts were two of her popular block-of-the-month programs.It was these projects which caused Julie to seek out fabric which would work for quilters by actually looking the part--for example piecing or appliquéing a brick cottage is a lot easier when you have fabric that actually has bricks printed on it.After searching in vain for fabrics that featured realistic building materials, she took initiative and designed her first fabric line.

Fabric design was not Julie's initial career path.She began her education at Ulster County Community College in upstate New York and graduated with degree in English education from Elmhurst College in Illinois.Julie was a middle school teacher for a year and a half before life took her in another direction--motherhood."I wanted to make a baby quilt for my son, Jeff, so I took a beginning quilting class from Barb Vlack."From there, Julie completed her first sampler project right away and began to seriously pursue quilting.In the beginning, Julie was a bit of a quilting purist."My emphasis was on hand quilting and I thought rotary cutters were disgusting," laughed Julie."Not anymore though!"she quickly added.The acceptance of rotary cutting is just one of the many changes that Julie's quilting style has undergone."There was one point when I accomplished all that I could with patchwork."She had tried to make pieced patchwork look like appliqué, but in the end she still hungered for realism in her patterns that could only be accomplished by appliqué."We called it the A-word," she laughed.Now a fan of gluing and raw edge appliqué, Julie's style has progressed about as far away from traditional as you can get!

In 1989, Julie left Illinois with her husband, Joe, for Newport, Oregon to open The Newport Quilt & Gift Company, a quilt shop right next door to her sister, Amber's cross-stitch shop.Because her shop was in a coastal town, it wasn't your traditional quilt shop, in the sense that it was oriented toward the visiting quilter."We were able to have a very diverse selection and focus on fun fabrics like batiks and landscape fabrics.So we didn't even carry solids or teach classes!"Owning a quilt shop for 15 years gave her an inside view of the needs and wants of quilters.It was this ability to anticipate what quilters were missing in their quilting pursuits that led her down the path of fabric design.

"I have no business designing fabric," stated Julie plainly."You have to force me to do it.It's only when I feel there is a hole or something that nobody has thought of yet that I design."Julie doesn't consider herself an artist because she doesn't paint; she sketches or uses her camera and graphics software to develop her fabric designs.With her Material Resources collection, realism was her agenda, "I went to lumber yards and took promotional materials about bricks and wood.I drew them by hand, paying close attention to color and scale."

After doing three realistic collections, Julie had wanted to do something softer and more spiritual.
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Being a quilt shop owner and a fabric designer gave Julie the opportunity to wear many different hats in the quilting world.Julie has also designed over 100 patterns."I was afraid to design quilts for a long time.I just wanted to take other people's designs and make them easier.I have a terrible time designing quilts without the fabric because I wait for the fabric to talk to me," Julie admitted.Somewhere along the way between owning her own shop and designing patterns and fabrics, something new surfaced."Designing fabric frustrated me because I felt that there wasn't enough emphasis placed on the designers."It was this realization that led her to develop a new quilting magazine called Designers' Quarters.

Her approach to the magazine's development was similar to her experiences designing fabric in the sense that Julie saw something that was missing.
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"He's a rare duck," Julie says fondly."He knows the industry backwards and forwards because he was brought up around it."Jeff writes for the magazine part-time in addition to his full-time job as a TV news reporter in Washington DC.Julie also has full support from her husband, Joe.He was the vice president of a bank card department in Oregon prior to joining Julie to help run the business.He now is the publisher for Designers' Quarters.Currently, the magazine is fully funded by advertising from fabric manufacturers.

"Magazines take a lot of time," notes Julie.She recently sold her quilt shop to one of her employees."We just couldn't do everything that we needed to do and keep the shop.It actually worked out very well because one my employees was interested in opening a quilt shop, so she purchased our inventory but we retained our name and our website."For Julie, the magazine is a brand new passion; she enjoys laying out pages and working with graphics; "I love collecting fonts almost as much as I enjoyed collecting fabric!
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The move will also bring them nearer to their son, Jeff, in Washington D.C. Things really seem to have come full circle for Julie; we'll have to keep an eye on her to see what she's up to in the future.In the meantime be sure to check out her new collection, Angel Song, and get a hold of a copy of Designers' Quarters!

New fabric line "Material Resources" designed by shop owner, Julie Golimowski.