For the past many years I have been a wife, mom, teacher, engineer and quilter. My two sons are a joy in my life and while one is in college the younger son will soon be headed off to college too. Teaching math brings me joy and presently I teach homeschooled high schoolers AP Statistics, online. My husband is supportive of all these endeavors and encourages my diverse interests. And, yes I worked as an engineer for 20 years and hold five patents related to abrasive grinding wheels. How does an engineer become a quilter?
I certainly did not start out as a longarm quilter artist, taking pieced tops and turning them into beautifully quilted tops. Longarm quilting artistry is certainly something that I have fallen in love with. I enjoy doing freehand quilting and pantograph patterns. There is a time and place for each technique on a quilt, and I enjoy seeing the quilt come to life as the quilting is added.
In the early ’80s I married into a family of quilters and I admired their quilts. A few months later my husband and I purchased our first home in the Clintonville area of Columbus, Ohio. Our daily walks took us past a little corner quilt shop. The first time I stopped in the owner shared that she was starting an 8 week hand-piecing course, that evening. What luck! I signed right up. It was during this course in 1983 I caught the quilting bug as I learned to hand-piece and hand-quilt from the lovely shop owner. For years I hand pieced and at one point I even built a 10′ long solid-cherry quilting frame to use to hand-quilt my largest tops.
The years passed and sometime in the early ’2000′s I switched from hand-piecing to machine piecing. I even turned to machine quilting at the kitchen table with a walking-foot attachment on my sewing machine but it always seemed like there was just too much material and not enough sewing space. My unfinished quilt tops accumulated and I wondered what I was going to do. Should I send the tops to a longarm quilter or should I dive into longarm quilting myself?
In early 2011 I purchased my Innova and began quilting my UFOs. Being someone who enjoys and benefits by learning from others I attended ABM’s Innova training course in St. George, Utah. This three-day intensive training class was amazing! But I didn’t stop my training there. In July I took additional longarm classes at Quilt Odyssey in Hershey, PA. In the past year I also attended the AQS show in Lancaster, PA and the Quilt Expo in Philadelphia, PA looking at quilts, gathering design ideas and chatting with other longarm quilters. In addition to quilting many of my UFOs, a dear quilting friend, who was in Stage IV cancer when I obtained my Innova, asked if I could quilt her UFOs for her and her family. Her projects kept me quite busy for several months.
And that brings us to today. Wander through my gallery, see some of the quilts I completed for Ann Mari
e’s family and a few of mine. If you have a quilting project you would like to chat with me about, send me a note. While I am new to longarm quilting, I fully understand the effort and love one puts into piecing a quilt top and I will quilt your top as if it were my own, with love and care.