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| I have always loved quilts - I don't know where this came
from. Although my mother was an excellent seamstress and made dresses for my sister and me, she never made a quilt and we
didn't have any in the house. I made my first quilt, a doll quilt, under my mother's guidance when I was seven. I inherited
my love of sewing from her, and made many of my own clothes. By the time I met my future husband, in 1978, I had a big bag
of scraps and a wish to make a real quilt. |
While I'm a dreamer, Frank is a doer (A perfect match!). I taught him how to use the sewing
machine, and shortly thereafter, I came down with mononucleosis. While he was taking care of me and spending long hours at
my apartment, he started cutting up scraps and made our first quilt, a scrap-bag log cabin. We decided to make two , one for
him and one for me, so for his next project, he decided on a Tumbling Blocks. Although it's a difficult pattern for a beginning
sewer, he did a great job, and we still have that quilt on our bed at home.
| As any quilt lover knows, there is always "one more pattern"
you have to try, and soon we were making quilts for friends and family. We found out that Frank was great at cutting and machine
sewing, while I was better at designing and hand sewing. After some frustation in trying to learn how to do the quilting stitch,
I took an hour lesson from Nancy Halpern, who lived nearby. |
That was the sum total of our "formal education" in quiltmaking. When all our friends and
family had quilts, we started selling them at craft shows in and around Cambridge, MA, where we lived. Two years after we
met, we got married and moved to an old house in the country in New Hampshire, where we continued quilting and expanding our
business while trying to "live off the land" and building a new house next to the old one. It was a nine room colonial and
soon after we moved in, we had quilting materials and supplies stored in all the rooms except the bathrooms!
In the late 1980's, we decided to look for a place with more land and we wound up building
a small house on a beautiful hilltop in Vermont. We put all the extra fabric in the attic, and kept on making quilts. To date,
we have made, or worked on, over 1200.
As a side line, we started buying antique quilts, cleaning and repairing them, and selling
them. We also do restoration work for other people who have cherished heirloom quilts that they want to preserve.
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| We take a lot of pride in our work and offer a moneyback
guarantee on anything we make, as we feel we don't want anyone to be unhappy with their purchase. We have made all kinds of
quilts over the years, but we specialize in the old-fashioned "scrap-bag" type, with dozens or possibly hundreds of different
fabrics in each quilt. Frank, who cuts up the scraps, hates to throw anything away, so he has developed a whole line of wall
hangings made up of tiny squares, 5/8" on each side.
Sadly, Frank passed away in 2015, so I have a limited number of quilts left. |
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