Carrie Jung Is Getting Married

By Lauren | Published: January 25, 2010
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Carrie is my younger sister by two years, so we were all a little surprised when she was the first one to get engaged…

Those who knew her well, back in her high school years of dating, refer to that time period as her “dumpster diving phase”. She dated a few guys here and there, but each relationship ended quickly and tragically for Little Carrie…

Then in the summer following graduation, she began working at Brusters, an icecream shop in our home town of Spartanburg, SC. She became fast friends with her manager, Inbal, and started hanging out with her on the weekends…

It was on one of these weekend outings that she met Inbal’s boyfriend, Andrew… AND it just so happened… that on this SAME weekend outing, Andrew decided to bring his brother, Jon, along.

Jon fell madly in love with Carrie… Carrie fell madly in love with Jon, and the rest is history.

This wonderful happy ending was made even happier by the fact that while I was living in Atlanta, my boyfriend, Beau decided to move in with Jon. The two of them later moved into my same apartment complex, and the three of us, along with their third roommate, Kevin, became the best of friends!

So, I suppose it works out well for everyone… Carrie’s getting married… Jon was in my “Atlanta gang” so I approve of the decision… my friend, Megan, took these awesome engagement photos (see below)… Beau and I both get to be in the wedding… my bride’s maid dress is ADORABLE…

AND… I was put in charge of the wedding invitations! (…or I might have demanded to be in charge of them, but that’s neither here nor there.) We’ve just finished producing her set of Save the Dates and those will be going out tomorrow. (See above.)

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And those are just a small taste of the interactive experience that is to come with the invitation itself!

Carrie’s wedding is in June and she decided to go with a very natural, garden inspired wedding… I used this organic inspiration as my jumping off point for the design… My first attempt with these produced a wild and crazy mass of plantlife that wound its way across the four page, accordion-fold invitation… But there was something about the illustration’s lack of structure that didn’t sit well with me. So I began again, and even though I kept the same flowers and vines, I let the structure of the vines take on the shape of an intricate wrought iron gate. Which produced this very structured, garden-themed drawing that we all LOVE!

Carrie’s starting to love them a little less, because she’s in charge printing, cutting, stickermaking, gluing, and round-corner punching each piece of her wedding invitation suite.

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Table Runner Leaves

By Lauren | Published: January 24, 2010
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Add some leaves to your table top with this quick & easy pattern!

You can find it in the Etc. Section underneath our Free Patterns Tab on our website; just click the pink download button on the right side of the page!
Or, you can click on the direct link here!

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Writing these patterns has become a very tag-team effort between me and my mom. We design them together. Then she takes the designs and figures out how to bring them to life. She writes up all of the instructions and then emails those, along with some rough sketches, to me. I take these and design the cover art and illustrations. Being a non-quilter… I feel as though I can objectively rate the ease of the instructions… and then add in a little here and there. Additionally, I’ve spent A LOT of time coming up with (what I consider to be) the perfect illustrations for each step… Because I know how annoying it is to have directions that were written for people with a very high skill level. (I think that if cookbooks would take a similar approach, I might try cooking once in a while…) After the instructions are written up, my mom then tests the patterns for the second time… just to make sure that we have all of our bases covered.

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We realize though, that even the most thorough instructions may occasionally sound vague to someone who is new to quilting. So we welcome any comments or questions that you all might come across! Feel free to either post your question here on our blog, or you can email us at LandJ@LaurenAndJessiJung.com and we’ll make sure to get back with you right away… as well as update our patterns with any necessary content! Happy quilting!

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Blooming Glories Pillow Pattern

By Lauren | Published: January 10, 2010
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This is one of our favorites!!

As some of you probably already know, we have six free patterns available for download. When we launched our website in October, we only had two of these six patterns actually loaded onto the site. The rest weren’t quite finished yet, but will be available well before our fabric arrives in stores this March.

This is our Blooming Glories Pillow Pattern and I’ve finally finished all of the formatting!! You can download this from our Patterns Section on our website. The download button is on the right hand side of the page.

Or, you can click on the direct link here.

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One really cool feature of this pattern is the back! It contains an image of the the same flower found on the front… but from behind!

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And here’s another color option!

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Lean Mean Quilting Machines

By Lauren | Published: January 1, 2010
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Spartanburg’s band of seven crazed quilters on a mission…

So before Market, my mom enlisted the help of her 7 close friends from Piedmont Piecers Quilt Guild in Spartanburg, SC (where she’s been a member for about 10 years) to help her get ready for Houston… My mom gave everyone the fabric of their choice and told them to have at it!

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Yes, this entry is a little after the fact, but we just received all of our creations back from Moda a few weeks ago… and now we have photographs to share!

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I think it would be really nice to have a photograph of the 8 women together, striking a Charlie’s Angelsesque Style pose. Sadly, no one else has jumped on board with this idea!

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These photos were taken by a close friend of mine, Megan Kibby, from Atlanta who is starting up a photography business. You can view more of her photos at Out of the Box Photography .

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The last photo is a pattern that we made for the Bake Shop. As soon as the line hits the stores we plan to post the instructions for this pattern there. We wanted to take an Andy Warhol Style towards quilting… The multicolored butterflies is somewhat reminiscent of his Marilyn Monroe silk screen prints.

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We Love Easter Eggs

By Lauren | Published: October 18, 2009
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When painted well, Easter Eggs can be very cool, but the kind of Eggs that I’m referring to are actually, secret surprises that can be found hidden in movies, art… our fabric line… etc.

If you’re not sure what I’m talking about, rest assured, you have probably experienced an Easter Egg at some point in your life… A few well-known examples include: the myriad of racey references sprinkled throughout Disney movies… the Apple logo that appears on the computer, Deep Thought, in The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy… and the rather random synchronization of The Wizard of Oz to Pink Floyd’s album, Dark Side of the Moon.

Because of my slightly obsessive love for these wonderful little surprises, my mom and I came up with our very own… In every line of fabric that we design, there will be always be a spiderweb. It might not always be obvious, but, rest assured, it will be there!

Now… you might be wondering, “Why spider webs?”

And to that I say, “Why not spider webs?” They are believed to bring good luck when hidden in crazy quilts and Christmas trees… and, they kill bugs! Anything that saves me the trouble of killing bugs myself, is OK in my book, and will always have a safe haven in my apartment!

Botany has three patterns that contain sed spider webs: Flora, Wildlife, and Toile

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The Infamous “Minibook” Fiasco of 2008

By Lauren | Published: October 16, 2009
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Moderation has never really been my strong suit… I’m not sure why that is exactly, but it began sometime in my early childhood… and… I think I’m going to go ahead and blame my parents.

Kidding… sort of.

Anyway, I’ve recently experienced a wicked bout of déjà vu as my mom and I were frantically assembling our 133 promotional packets before this year’s Fall Market… The following entry describes the source of this déjà vu.

Exactly 1 year ago, immediately following my graduation from the Portfolio Center, our entire class, flew to New York City for a Portfolio Review. The night before my flight, I was frantically trying to design, print, and assemble 10 “minibooks” to hand out at the review. After months of sleep deprivation… I found that I wasn’t in the correct state of mind to begin this task 7 hours before my flight.

After the panic set in, I cried for a few minutes, then called and woke-up a team of helpers at 3:00 in the morning: my boyfriend, Beau, my sister, Carrie, and her boyfriend, Jon. Over the next two hours, we all printed, folded, and cut out the first three pages of sed minibooks, at which point, I came to terms with my inevitable defeat… the minibooks had won.

Carrie and Jon volunteered to make a Kinko’s Run… it was 5:00 AM.

Kinko’s did an amazing job for the minimal fee of $400, but I still had to cut, fold, and assemble these books once arriving at the hotel in New York… Thankfully, I had Carrie with me, who turned out to be quite the little trooper…

She stayed up with me until midnight in order to finish these before the review the next morning… even after being rudely awakened at 3:00 AM to help me the night before… AND despite her plans to wake up at 4:00 the next morning in order to stand outside of the Today Show.

And, my story doesn’t end there… after not having slept more than 5 hours in the last three days, my phone alarm wasn’t quite enough to get the job done the next morning… Carrie had to leave her much anticipated Today Show at 8:00 that morning, and walk the 26 blocks back to hotel, in order to wake me up in time for the Portfolio Review. I’m a terrible sister.

Carrie fondly refers to this course of events as the “Infamous Minibook Fiasco of 2008″… and rightfully so. I’m still trying to make it up to her!

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And on a more positive note… I’m happy to report that I must be getting better at these last minute projects from hell… because my mom and I finished up our promotional packets at 11:30 the night before our flight… we had a full 3 hours of sleep before having to wake up and go to the airport the next morning!

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A Little Bit of Background

By Lauren | Published: October 16, 2009
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We’re the Jungs (pronounced “young”), and we love to quilt, create, and inspire!

If you’ve read the About Us Section of either this blog or our website, you can probably skip this entry… it’s pretty much copied and pasted, verbatim.

1 / Lauren:

• Born and raised in Spartanburg, SC
• Studied abroad in Cortona, Italy
• Bachelor’s Degree in Fine Arts—Furman University
• Graduate Degree in Graphic Design—Portfolio Center, Atlanta
• Currently a web designer—G2 Interactive
• Living in Philadelphia, 818 miles away from her sweet boyfriend, Beau

2 / Jessi:

• Born and raised in Amish country—Pennsylvania
• Bachelor’s Degree in Sociology—Clemson University
• Master’s Degree in Deaf Education—Converse College
• Currently a quilter and pattern designer
• Living in Spartanburg, SC with her husband, Chip, a cute dog named Rudy, and nearby to her youngest daughter, Carrie.

3 / Why We Work

(a little bit of a pun)
• Team work certainly has its merits, especially when coming into this with two completely different backgrounds and skill sets. We do all of our brainstorming together. First, we develop a central concept for the main fabric, then we decide how this will be carried out through each of the supporting fabrics.
• Jessi is in charge of all of the initial sketches, which Lauren takes and recreates on her Mac.
• Together we refine, tweek, arrange, and choose colors.
• Once the line is complete, we divide and conquer… Lauren is in charge of everything web related… designing, programming, blogging, etc., while Jessi is busy designing patterns. She managed to design and write six patterns for our first line!

4 / Our First Line

• Botany attempts to reveal an intricacy and delicacy found within the natural world, while drawing its inspiration from traditional botanical illustrations (as can be seen in the main fabric, Flora.)
• The largest print, Wildlife, takes on a free flowing organic style, and includes elements from each of our nine supporting fabrics, thus unifying the series.

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The Very First Blog Entry

By Lauren | Published: October 3, 2009
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Wow! This “very first blog entry” has turned out to be quite the daunting task… finding the perfect first sentence is oddly intimidating, so I’m going to have to jump right in and introduce myself. My name is Lauren Jung and my mom, Jessi, and I have recently designed our first fabric line for Moda Fabrics. 

To give a little context to this whole venture…  I recently finished up a graduate program in graphic design at the Portfolio Center in Atlanta. I looked for a job, but being October, no firms were hiring which lead to a very depressing Christmas. 

It was this same feeling of failure…  mixed with a little bit of boredom that lead to the actual idea of designing a line of fabric. After sitting around for a few days at my grandparent’s house in Topton, PA, I told my mom that I thought we should design a fabric line… because, afterall, how hard could it be.

Three months later, after many frustrating late nights, we finished our line and decided to call it Botany. I assembled a fanciful promotional box set containing a deck of 65 swatch cards (each displaying a different pattern in its full 10×10 glory, as well as a book of 9 quilts and 5 alternate applications… in order to show the line’s diversity and potential. After dotting all my i’s and crossing all my t’s, I dropped this extremely tedious presentation into the mail and sent it to Moda Fabrics.

If it wasn’t for the thoroughness of FEDex, however, this extremely tedious presentation would have been submitted anonymously, as I forgot to include any form of identification within the packet…  no name, no phone number, no return address. 

I never cease to amaze myself!

That week turned out to be a very lucky week for me! Within days of hearing that Moda was going to produce our line, I found out from G2 Interactive, the web design company that I had applied to five months prior, that they were going to hire me on as a web designer!

It’s been a real feat balancing my day job with my fabric designing, and I’ve become very thankful for my amazing time management skills. In two months I’ve thrown together this blog, designed and created our website, and within a week, banged out 133 promotional packets to hand out at this year’s Fall Market… which was no small task. Also in this two month span, my mom has designed and written the instructions for 6 complimentary patterns (available for download on our website), as well as outlined and sketched out the idea for our next line. We’ve gotten together twice now since I’ve moved, but the majority of our collaboration takes place over the phone…  with me in Philadelphia and her in Spartanburg, SC.

And… I think that about covers everything in terms of an intro… we’re so excited to be a part of this whole scene, and look forward to hearing from anyone and everyone who is interested in us, our line, or fabric design in general!

Cheers!

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Posted in Botany, Uncategorized | 24 Comments