Legally blind Jenks woman embarks on a new career

A few years ago Karen Price was a successful computer systems engineer for the FAA, and then a car accident left her legally blind and changed her life. <br/><br/>News on 6 reporter Rick Wells says a

Tuesday, April 5th 2005, 10:12 am

By: News On 6

A few years ago Karen Price was a successful computer systems engineer for the FAA, and then a car accident left her legally blind and changed her life.

News on 6 reporter Rick Wells says a Jenks woman has not let a loss of sight dim her passion for quilting. Karen Price is showed me around her latest quilt project. "There are all different colors. I changed them on purpose to make it more lifelike." This is her rendition of a quilting pattern called little brown bird. She's been working on it for about a year.

Almost 6 years ago a car accident left her legally blind, actually she sees most of the time, but almost daily she suffers a temporary blindness that make it impossible to work, so she taught herself to quilt. "This calms me, I need to do it I don't know how to explain that." Her first quilt, pretty difficult looking design for a beginner. "I was too stupid to know this was hard."

She quilts sometimes 12 or 14 hours a day, even through the periods of blindness, which can last as long as an hour, her fingers substitute for her eyes. "I can feel up against the edge and underneath, and that's what I do." She uses a blue tape as a guide. "You've figured out a way to do this creative thing, when you can see and when you can't." She'll finish this in about a month and enter it in the Jenks quilting show in July and she hopes to get it in a Houston quilt show in November.

She got her hands on the Capital dome stain glass design and can't wait to turn it into a quilt. The Centennial Commission told her it is anxious to see her quilt of the Capital dome stained glass when she's finished.