Sylvia Pippen grew up in the San Francisco Bay Area and was taught to sew at a very early age by her mother, Kitty Pippen. While raising her family in Shelburne Falls, Massachusetts, Sylvia studied tailoring and patternmaking and designed jackets made with Japanese Yukatas and Seminole patchwork. Owner of a perennial flower nursery, Sylvia installed gardens, arranged flowers for weddings, and wrote weekly gardening columns for the local newspaper. When her children were grown, Sylvia and her partner, Peter, sold the forty-acre farm and bought an old forty-foot sailboat, where she learned to quilt in cramped quarters and to mend sails. Sylvia’s quilts took on a tropical twist when she moved to Hawaii and worked as a gardener at the National Tropical Botanical Garden on Kauai. After co-authoring a book with her mother, Sylvia turned to teaching and designing patterns and fabric kits full time. Sylvia now resides in La Conner, Washington, and owns a quilt shop called Indigo Stitch.