Meet the Maker: Teresa Mairal Barreu

“I have a clear memory while I was growing up of my mother, needle and thread in hand or hunched over an old black peddle-powered Singer sewing machine. She would always be sewing something, whether clothing or embroidery or even mending,” Teresa says of her childhood influences. “I never gave it a second thought, preferring knitting instead. But I trace my connection with quilting to observing my mother at that time.” Eventually, when time and life permitted, Teresa came to quilting herself. What started as a hobby (and still largely is), became her business through blogging and videography. She elaborates: “I discovered the thrill and joys of quilting in about 2004. Five years later I started my blog and progressively I started to share tutorials of the quilts and other projects I was making. Then in 2015 I thought of making the sort of quilting videos I’d like to watch: short, quick and to the point with the minimum details required to make one single block or learn a technique.”

A pioneer in the quilting video world, Teresa now has a whopping 182,000 YouTube subscribers which has opened up business opportunities for her as well as fulfilling her creatively. “My interest in quilting has grown more than I ever expected. I used to think of quilting as a weekend hobby, but as soon as I started doing videos, editing the video was half the fun. I like the challenge of making a short video packed with information that’ll make people think ‘oh wait, I can do that!’. I’m a teacher at heart, I think,” she says. As a result of her videos, she’s also been offered book collaborations and has written her own book, Turnabout Patchwork: simple quilts with a twist.

Teresa is a well-known quilter, but not for any one particular style – she has an eclectic style that appeals to many quilters. Designing is her favourite part of the quilting process. “I love designing. I usually design in EQ8 and I have designed hundreds of quilts I’ll never make. I can be testing out variations of a single idea forever and then I’ll just close the file and will never make the quilts,” she explains. Teresa does, of course, make a lot of the quilts she designs. She enjoys the piecing process, but is not so keen on quilting and outsources this to long arm quilters.

Teresa is definitely the kind of artist who freely follows her current interests. She lets creativity take her in any direction it wants, without forcing things, and finds this particularly useful if she’s in a sewing rut. “Creativity feeds creativity in my experience. I may start with a simple idea and that idea leads to another idea and so on and so forth. That’s why I have so many quilts that are at the design stage that will never get made!” she laughs.

While Teresa still considers quilting to be primarily a hobby, she’s prolific on YouTube, which she monetises. She explains: “I release two videos a week, one of them is a mash up of previous videos and the weekend video is a new video. Some videos require templates or they’re a pattern. I sell those either from day one or after offering them. I used to offer patterns and templates for free but that’s damaging to quilters who do have a quilting business they rely on to pay their bills.”

For Teresa, quilting – and her videos about quilting – are the way she shares her creative story with the world. “Quilting allows me to share my skills, my love of teaching, and the idea that anyone can learn no matter their age,” she says. But for the most part, Teresa is a quilter who is doing what she loves, at her own pace. “At the moment, I’m lucky enough that I can have a dream creative day most days of the week. No day is the same. I may do some research for my videos – I tend to do four or five over a few days – or edit some video I’ve done. Other times I prepare my social media posts and schedule them in advance, I may design a quilt and make it straight away or design it and sit on it. It varies a lot. I’m making the most of my free time here and I’m dedicating a lot of my day to my quilting: sewing, videos, creating patterns and the like.”

Get Teresa’s stunning Summer Yin Yang quilt pattern, shown on the left, in Make Modern Issue 46. See Teresa’s video featuring her Summer Yin Yang quilt here.