American resident of Kenya, Dena holds advanced degrees in design and textiles. From her home in rural Africa, Dena teaches design through symmetry, innovative quilting from built-up layers of improvisation, and art quilting from sketching through quilt completion. Previously a commissioned quilt artist in Nairobi, she taught for Quilt University 2004-13 and for QuiltEdOnline 2014-16. Dena cofounded the Kenya Quilt Guild. A SAQA Juried Artist Member, she has written articles about quilting for Studio Art Quilt Associates’ Journal, American Quilter, The Quilt Show, QuiltPosium and Cotton Spice. She has taught at such prestigious venues as IQF Houston and Chicago, Canadian Quilt Festival, European Patchwork Meeting, New Zealand’s Quilt Symposia and South Africa National Quilt Festivals.

Dena exposes every patchwork quilt student to new ways of thinking about creativity, design and self-expression, and she offers some rather unusual sewing techniques to help students accomplish their goals. On the personal side, Dena is an amateur genealogist and a keen lawn bowler. Her present family includes her husband, 4 stepchildren, 4 grandchildren, 4 Dalmatians, 5 cats, a troop of vervet monkeys, a tank full of platies, a favourite tree squirrel (not native to the area) and a gennet cat who lives in the roof. Dena’s family lives two hundred miles north of Nairobi on the edge of a coffee-with-cream-colored lake with some of the world’s most wonderful birds, venomous snakes, monitor lizards, crocodiles, lungfish and hippos. Life there is never boring!

Workshops by Dena Dale Crain

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