Kaffe Fassett Quilts
& Biography

Click for larger images
Pinwheel Tablecloth	Squares Windowblind
Delft Baskets	Hankerchief Corners
Optical Squares Tablecloth

Biography

Best-selling author, designer, and textile artist, Kaffe Fassett has attracted huge audiences worldwide to the knitting, needlepoint, tapestry mosaics, and now patchwork quilting crafts. He has presented his craft and color inspirations on his popular British television series Glorious Colour, and his mosaic garden won the gold medal at the 1998 Chelsea Flower Show.

After creating the first one-man show of a living textile artist at The Victoria & Albert Museum in London, this major exhibition of his work traveled the world. Plus, in one of the most exciting commissions he has received to date, The Royal Shakespeare Company commissioned Fassett to co-design the set and costumes for the opening of their Millennium season. Taking the Elizabethan era as his inspiration, he put his talents to work on the play "As You Like It."

Fassett grew up in Big Sur, California. Originally from San Francisco, his mother's family was responsible for founding Carmel by the Sea as an artist colony. His father (a Tennessee native) bought the ramshackle house formerly owned by Rita Hayworth and Orson Welles and turned it into the renowned restaurant Napenthe, where the movie "Sandpiper" with Elizabeth Taylor was filmed on the beautiful terrace overlooking the sea. (The restaurant is still owned and run by family.) As such, Fassett's young life was continually filled with characters of renown, such as family friend, author Henry Miller.

When Fassett was 19, he won a scholarship to the Museum of Fine Arts School in Boston. While in school, Fassett met Christopher Isherwood, the British-born novelist whose best-known work inspired the world-famous musical "Cabaret." Fassett was so inspired by Isherwood that he became determined to go to the country of Isherwood's birth, and shortly thereafter departed for London, where he has made his home since 1964.

Traditionally trained as a painter, Fassett discovered the world of colorful yarn on a visit to a Scottish wool mill with a fashion designer, Bill Gibb. Inspired by the colors in the surrounding landscape Fassett was thrilled to find the same colors in yarns, and, on an impulse, bought twenty colors of Shetland wool and some knitting needles. Ironically, it was a fellow passenger on the train ride home that taught him the skill that, coupled with his own design sense for color, would make him legendary.

His first original project, a vest in thirty colors, was published in Vogue Knitting magazine. He worked for a time with the famous Italian design firm Missoni., then returned to England to start up his own studio. His clients have included the likes of Lauren Bacall and Barbara Streisand. His television show, Glorious Colour, grew to enormous popularity in both England and North America, and his books and design work continue to bring new and enthusiastic fans from around the globe.

Travel is a constant source of inspiration for Fassett- from his original move to England, where he discovered the subtleties of silver and bronze garden tones and realized the intense beauty of stone, to his travels to Alaska where the sapphire blue of glaciers cemented the region's beauty in his mind and work.

In 1997, Fassett traveled to India for an unprecedented weaving project (at the initial request of the international charity Oxfam) to work with weavers is a remote village of Andhra Pradesh and advise on creating designs that would be more marketable in the West. True to form, Fassett's inspiring journey resulted in tremendous beneficial results for the community as well as some of the most fabulous hand-woven cotton sari fabrics the Western world has ever seen. Immediately entranced by the extraordinary color in these lightweight fabrics, Fassett adapted his knitting patterns to designs for patchwork quilts.

Fassett gives slide presentations and workshops on color in design which take him all over the world, allowing him the opportunity to gather new design inspirations. Fassett's unique sense of color coupled with his drive to create- and encourage others to create- has led to his legendary reputation as a guru in the world of color and textiles. Very influenced by the past- his latest projects incorporate pieces from the antique quilts that he has purchased on his travels- Fassett's use of ( and sense of) color, both bold and vivid, are incomparable.

• Kaffe Fassett fabrics - more than 40 to choose from! - and Fatpacts.
• Images from the Kaffe Fassett Invitational Quilt Show, September 2005, at the
  Connie Bean Center, Portsmouth, NH