Hello, my name is Lyn Kenny. In my former life I was an English teacher, Head of Modern Languages Department, Head of English Faculty and Deputy Principal in a number of Secondary Schools in Queenland, Australia. In 1994 I was forced to take some time off from teaching due to illness. Graeme, my husband, bought me a Pfaff 7570 and the PCD_WIN software, to give me something to do while I was home. I’m sure he had no idea how obsessive this hobby would become! LOL

I taught myself to digitize with PCD_WIN (and it is still a wonderful little program). Each month, I downloaded Amy Webster’s lessons in PCD_WIN and worked through them and then just played with the program to see what I could do with it. I digitized my first free-standing lace with PCD_WIN.

I went back to teaching from 1998-2004 and continued to spend all of my spare time embroidering, sewing, digitizing. After retiring from teaching, I set about to digitize Antique Rose. It took me 3 months and 7 versions before I was happy with the result. Friends who saw the quilt assured me that it was as good as Jenny Haskins designs and encouraged me to set up a website. What an amazing challenge that was!

KennyKreations went live on 4 November 2004, with only one set of designs!

The rest, as the saying goes, is history. It was only ever meant to be a hobby – I had no idea that it would become an international business, with magazine articles, TV appearances, teaching commitments and trips to the United States.

As the business grew, I was determined to develop beautiful designs that were original and creative – I also wanted customers to get great value. So I focused on design collections where customers would use every single design in the collection to make a finished product, like a quilt, or a set of table linen, an heirloom Christening gown, or a lovely sashiko bag. I include with all of our designs, detailed instructions, with photos of the process every step of the way. I also invested in some wonderful, professional software, Wilcom ES2006, then Embroidery Studio V1.5e; though I also play with Bernina Artista V5, 4D Creative Suite and Janome Digitizer MB. I use Embird every day for editing and converting designs, as well as creating wonderful quilt blocks. There are several Embird tutorials on our new website.

In 2006, my beautiful daughter, Christine, left her job in Melbourne and came home to work with me. She is responsible for all the beautiful, original artwork. When I discussed with her my concept for a continuous Jacobean design, she sat on the floor for 2 days with a roll of grease-proof paper 75” long, and drew the panel which later became the Jacobean Garden Quilt. With her encouragement and support, we flew out to Houston in October 2006 to the International Quilt Festival, where one of our customers was exhibiting the Antique Rose Quilt. After a series of trunk shows in Dallas, Jonesboro, Owensborough, Springfield and Nashville, we arrived home, with a Gammill Longarm Quilting machine.

We went back to Houston in 2007, where we had a booth at Houston Quilt Market and Festival. It was a wonderful opportunity to meet lots of our existing customers and many new ones as well.

In 2008, Christine has arranged for us to be at all the Stitches and Craft Shows here at home – Melbourne, Brisbane and Sydney. In February, we held our first live-in Retreat at the Bunya Mountains, where a delightful group of creative ladies from NSW, started work on their Jacobean Garden Quilts. I will also taught a number of Embird Seminars. In November, I had the wonderful experience of teaching an embroidery class at the Nancy Zieman Love of Sewing Retreat in California.

We have expanded our business to include
• E-books (electronic book – download it immediately and print it out!) on topics such as Simply-Quilt-as-you-go and how to use piped binding on a quilt to avoid any hand stitching.
• Tutorial Videos – for Embird, Artista and 4D Creative Suite
• SimplyBetter™ – our own range of stabilizers.

I don’t know what happened to retirement, but work was never this much fun!