QUILTER | TEACHER | AUTHOR | FOUNDER
Back in October, national quilting celebrities Alex Anderson and Ricky Tims spent three days in Winterset. They’re hosts of the online program “The Quilt Show,” which they created and which has thousands of subscribers. The ten-person videography team spent Day … Read More
On Christmas Day, after breakfast and gifts, my daughter Rebecca plucked Roald Dahl’s Matilda from the bookshelf and offered to read it to us. On the sofa, Mary was tying a quilt, Hannah lounging. Jack was tidying up the kitchen, and Mark and … Read More
At age twenty-five, holding my newborn infant in my arms, I discovered a remarkable truth, almost as if Hannah were speaking to me. The more you give, the more you get back. I had given myself in marriage and in … Read More
Podcasts (new-fangled radio shows) are hugely popular these days. Quilters love them! We access episodes on our computers or smart phones when we’re sewing, binging-listening to stories of true crime, scientific discovery, or mysterious phenomena. A podcast series specifically for … Read More
The Friday evening after Thanksgiving, families who’ve been working on leftover turkey and pie all day gather downtown for Winterset’s Festival of Lights. They drink hot cocoa, warm their hands at sidewalk burn barrels, and stroll around the square admiring … Read More
Independent filmmaker Jack C. Newell* (who happens to be my son-in-law) rolled into town late Monday night, en route Chicago from Boulder, CO, where he recently wrapped filming on his latest project, a dark romantic comedy titled “Monuments.” The story … Read More
Because 2018 marks the 200th anniversary of the publication of Frankenstein,* articles about Mary Shelley and her famous novel are popping up everywhere. Having spent years studying Shelley, almost five writing my novel about her, I read them warily. You could … Read More
In 1986, my latest, greatest quilt was Lady Liberty Medallion. I was thirty-seven years old, living on a farm in Madison County, Iowa, my children age ten, six, and three, many of my youthful dreams still intact. I didn’t know I … Read More
During my years as a business co-owner and continent-crossing teacher of quilting, consuming fiction was a luxury only intermittently enjoyed. I probably managed only a dozen or so novels a year, reading them during air travel before Internet access on … Read More
Quilters are nice people, but we can be snobs. When Liz Porter and I discovered patchwork in the mid-1970s, machine quilting existed, but self-respecting quilters eschewed it, pointing to ugly, puffy hotel bedspreads. We quilted our tops by hand. In … Read More