An introduction

Well I am finally succumbing to blogging!

My name is Tracey Browning & I live on a cereal farm with my DH & 3 kids 14, 12 & nearly 9yrs old. We crop approx 3000acres of cereals each year & sharefarm up to 800 sheep as well.

For a number of years (too many to count) I have been an obsessed patchworker & quilter. I have always been enamoured by the quilting designs just a little more than the piecing/applique design process and gradually realised that this is the way I wanted to go....

Back in 2000 I had the opportunity to purchase my first longarm machine second hand. It arrived early in Dec & 4 days later I wrote my car off & hurt myself enough so that I could not touch/move my machine for about 6 weeks. I nearly gave up on my dream as it hurt so much every time I tried to practice. I lost my self confidence in this period & if it wasn't for my very first customer (my middle child's kindy teacher) who threw a quilt at me & said 'just stipple it!' then that machine may have simply been sold.

That was certainly the start of my love affair with machine quilting & longarm machines. I now have my third longarm machine - the A1Elite. I tried this machine out at MQX in 2005 when invited over there to teach other longarmers about using templates/rulers with these machines. There were none in Australia at that time....long story short LOL! DH wanted to buy a new header(combine) and keep the old one. I was dithering & dreaming about the A1 machine all this time with him saying that I couldn't drive 2 machines at the same time etc etc. Once he purchased this VERY expensive bit of farm machinery & kept the old one (they only get used 6 weeks of the year as well) then well I just got tough & said if he could have 2 machines then so could I!! I have now gone one better as I can now use both my machines AT THE SAME TIME as I have installed an Intelliquilter computerised system on my APQS Millennium and can be running that whilst doing custom work on my preferred machine the A1 Elite.

I am now a dealer for A1 Quilting machines and the Intelliquilter as well as one of the largest suppliers of machine quilting books, DVD's , rulers & notions for machine quilting in Australia. I have also been publishing patterns in magazines both here in Australia, Canada, USA, France & Japan for nearly 9 years.

My latest, most exciting venture is with my sister, Helen Stubbings of www.hugsnkisses.net
being a new business called Wysistas that produces Quizzles(R) - Interactive quilt patterns on CDRom. These have recently been reviewed on The Quilt Show by Ricky Tims and Alex Anderson and are available in the USA from www.onwordboundbooks.com

Life is exciting and moving maybe a little too fast at the moment. But I'll try to keep my head above water so I can appreciate all that is happening right now with both my family & my business.....
cheers
Tracey