Carla Hemlock
Spotlight QSOS interviewee – Carla is a textile and mixed media artist. Her work was part of group exhibits in the US, Canada, Germany, Russia and France. Her quilt ‘Tribute to the Mohawk Ironworkers, was amongst the 2019 ‘Smithsonian American Women, Remarkable Objects & Stories of Strength Ingenuity and Vision from the National Collection. Her works are in private, corporate and public collections including the Smithsonian Museum of American Art, Smithsonian National Museum of American Indian, Boston Museum of Fine Arts, Montreal Museum of Contemporary Art, Minneapolis Institute of Art and Musee National des Beaux Arts du Quebec.
Tula Pink
Spotlight QSOS interviewee -Tula Pink is an illustrator first with a passion for sewing and quilting. She turned her talents fabric design in 2007 and has never looked back. Tula partners with companies all over the world to develop beautiful and useful products for the home Sewist. She has developed sewing machines with BERNINA, a line of scissors and sewing hardware with Brewer, ribbons, embroidery, threads, books and so much more over her 15 year career. She works out of her design studio in Midwest with her brother Cameron.
Jennifer Sampou
Spotlight QSOS interviewee – Jennifer Sampou studied design at the Fashion Institute of Technology in New York City. Jennifer moved to California and became the creative director for P&B Textiles. In 1990s, she opened her independent Studio Sampou and created best-selling fabrics for Robert Kaufman. Jennifer co-founded Create and Sustain non profit with Patty Murphy and Kristy McDonough. Find Jennifer’s book, Ombré Quilts and patterns with C&T Publishing. She actively teaches online and around the world! Visit JenniferSampou.com or her Instagram for up to date information
Gwen Westerman
QSOS Interviewer – A poet and fiber artist, Gwen Westerman lives in southern Minnesota, as did her Dakota ancestors. Her roots are deep in the landscape of the tallgrass prairie, and reveal themselves in her art and writing through the languages and traditions of her family. She is an enrolled member of the Sisseton Wahpeton Oyate, and Professor in English and Humanities at Minnesota State University, Mankato. Her quilts have won awards at the juried shows of the Northern Plains Indian Art Market, the Heard Museum Guild Indian Art Fair & Market, and the Eiteljorg, and have been exhibited in Minneapolis, Sioux Falls, Anchorage, Houston, Tulsa, Fargo, and Lincoln. She is the author Follow the Blackbirds, a poetry collection in Dakota and English, and co-author of Mni Sota Makoce: Land of the Dakota, a history of Dakota land tenure in Minnesota.
Angela Walters
QSOS interviewer – I love all things related to quilting! I started my quilting career at the side of my husband’s grandpa. He patiently taught me the art of quilting by helping me make my first quilt, a 9 patch quilt that is still on my bed today. I can’t believe how much has changed since that first quilt! I am still a quilter, of course, but now I can add Author, Quilting Teacher, and Fabric Designer to my resume. I love to give lectures and teach quilting classes. But, no matter what accomplishments I list on my bio, it pales in comparison to the titles I hold in my personal life: Mother to three adorable children, Wife to my awesome husband for over 20 years, and confirmed coffee addict. And of course, Grandpa’s Girl.
Patty Murphy
QSOS Interviewer – Patty Murphy is the Executive Director and co-founder of Create and Sustain – a non-profit dedicated to helping shift environmental changes using our collective voice in the quilting, home sewing, and craft industries. Patty has been sewing since she was a child and began quilting at 18. In 2019 she reached out to Jennifer about sustainability in the quilting and crafting worlds and Create and Sustain was born.
Meg Cox
Panel moderator, Second Lives: Re-using Antique & Vintage Quilts, and Host –
Meg Cox makes quilts for fun and tells stories for a living. A working journalist since college, she is a former staff writer for the Wall Street Journal who has also freelanced for almost any quilt publication you know about, and some you don’t. At one point, she had a column called “Trade Talk” in a magazine for quilt shop owners while also writing a gossip column for Mark Lipinski’s magazine Quilter’s Home. Her popular free newsletter “Quilt Journalist Tells All” has been going strong since 2008, and Meg is a staff writer for Quiltfolk magazine. Her inspiring, informative lectures are popular with guilds (on Zoom these days). Meg serves on the advisory board of the International Quilt Museum in Lincoln, Nebraska, and previously served for a decade on the board of the Quilt Alliance.
Marjorie Childress
Second Lives: Re-using Antique & Vintage Quilts panelist – Marjorie Childress began quilt collecting with a stack of classic southern scrap quilts sitting on her grandmother’s bed in the 1980s. Today, her collection numbers around 300, spanning the 19th and 20th centuries, with strong thematic themes of improvisation, culture, and remembrance. More about the quilts can be found at www.anonymousquilt.com
Sandra Chandler
Second Lives: Re-using Antique & Vintage Quilts panelist – Sandra Lee Chandler is a seamstress and quilting designer/instructor who lives and works in Southern California. Sandra graduated with honors in Home Economics from Arizona State University, Tempe, AZ and received a B. S. Liberal Arts, Home Economics degree. Sandra’s work has been shown in exhibitions and several publications, and she has appeared on Quilting Arts and The Quilt Show.
Coulter Fussell
Second Lives: Re-using Antique & Vintage Quilts panelist– Coulter Fussell produces boundary pushing quilt-works using discarded and donated textiles/ clothes as her sole materials. Taught to quilt by her mother, Coulter has exhibited works across the country. She won the 2021 Mississippi Museum of Art Biennial Invitational, is a 2021 Museum of Arts and Design Burke Prize Finalist, a 2019 United States Artists Fellow in Craft and the 2017 SouthArts Southern Prize Finalist. She was featured in the December 2021 issue of ‘Art In America.’ Coulter lives in Water Valley, Mississippi with her family where she maintains her studio.
Roderick Kiracofe
Second Lives: Re-using Antique & Vintage Quilts panelist – Quilts, their makers, the art, and collecting has been a major part of my life the past 45 years. It has been a completely unexpected journey and a pleasure to have made contributions to this unique and wonderful world of quilts.
Kim Martucci
Second Lives: Re-using Antique & Vintage Quilts panelist – Kim Martucci is a former meteorologist who lives in the Washington DC suburbs with her husband and two kids. Kim started sewing shortly after the birth of her daughter, and found solace in creativity through sewing her dresses and other outfits. Kim’s creative direction took a turn in 2017 with the start of a quilting business that she launched with a friend. While being stuck at home during the early days of the pandemic, she was looking for a new and fresh project to undertake. She had admired the colorful and unique quilt coats that she was seeing on social media and used her garment-making experience to make one for herself. After sharing her creations online, she received lots of requests for coats, and so she launched a new venture of custom quilt coats. Kim sources the quilts used at estate auctions and antique fairs, and gives them a new life so they can be used and repurposed while still retaining their functionality and beauty.
Zak Foster
Panel Moderator, Sustainable Stitching: Making Quilts with the Earth in Mind – Raised in rural North Carolina and now living in Brooklyn, New York, Zak is a self-taught artist whose work draws on Southern textile traditions while incorporating repurposed fabrics. He practices an approach to design that is intuitive and improvisational. He is especially drawn to preserving the stories of quilts and specializes in memory quilts and burial quilts. His work has been featured in on the red carpet of the Met Gala, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, as well as various magazines, websites, and galleries. His QUILTY NOOK community connects and inspires quilters and makers all over the world.
Eliu Hernandez
Sustainable Stitching: Making Quilts with the Earth in Mind panelist – Eliu is a textile artist specializing in reclaimed materials. Two of his obsessions include denim and reclaimed thread. He lives in Northglenn, CO with his wife, their daughter and puppy.
Natalya Khorover
Sustainable Stitching: Making Quilts with the Earth in Mind panelist – Reclaiming and repurposing materials to use in Natalya’s art has been her practice for nearly 20 years. She uses meditative hand stitching and mending of vintage linen, alongside her industrial sewing machine to stitch and collage layers of translucent single-use plastics which would otherwise contribute to litter pollution. The transformation she subjects them to makes these materials unrecognizable.
Amanda Nadig
Sustainable Stitching: Making Quilts with the Earth in Mind panelist
The art of being resourceful means more to me than just saving money. This started early for me in my career as a public school art teacher when I watched things being thrown out daily. I wanted to teach my students to take notice of the materials around them that could be used in their artmaking.
Amanda Nadig, Chicago IL, has been quilting every day since 2019. When pulling fabric for a new quilt, she is drawn to interesting juxtapositions discovered in a variety of found fabrics: heavy/thin, opaque/sheer, shiny /flat, synthetic /natural, old/new, textured/smooth, and faded/highly saturated. Her two children are often collaborators on her quilts and her work as a high school art teacher keeps her challenged and inspired.
Bridget O’Flaherty
Sustainable Stitching: Making Quilts with the Earth in Mind panelist Bridget O’Flaherty is a Canadian quilter and textile artist passionate about the natural environment. She loves the tactile nature of anything fibre and expressing a connection to the land. She brings 30 years of experience and is an internationally renowned, award-winning quilt artist focusing primarily on free-motion thread painting in her natural landscape designs. She “draws” with her sewing machine, building up layers of thread to create her art that blends quilting, felting and stitching. Bridget uses combinations of local, up-cycled, recycled and organic materials and includes botanical and natural dyes in her original works. She brings her sustainability consultant background into her textile art and loves to share her passion for exploring what sustainability looks like in quilting and textile arts.
Kim Smith Soper
Sustainable Stitching: Making Quilts with the Earth in Mind panelist Kim Smith Soper is the co-founder of FeelGood Fibers, an online community for quilters to buy and sell secondhand fabrics. Since 2014, she has been writing about, sharing tips, and one-to-one coaching quilters on how decluttering and sustainability can help them bring intention to their creative practice. Kim shares her quilts at Leland Ave Studios. She lives on Long Island with her husband and three boys.
Michele Muska
Sustaining a Creative Business – Michele Muska has been part of the quilt community and industry for many years and the Director of Content for Oliso. She is an author, teacher, columnist, fiber artist and past Quilt Alliance board member. You can find her custom stitching work at www.michelemuska.com or in her Etsy Shop michelemuska.
Lisa Bongean
Sustaining a Creative Business panelist – Known world-wide for her primitive style of quilting, Lisa Bongean calls Oshkosh Wisconsin home. This is where it all happens for Primitive Gatherings’s, a brick and Mortar store, retreat house and website. Lisa designs award winning primitive and folk art style quilts, featuring wool applique and embroidery stitches. Primitive Gatherings specializes in beautiful hand-dyed wools along with Moda fabrics creating her homespun, flannel and reproduction fabrics.
Pat Sloan
Sustaining a Creative Business panelist – Pat Sloan, designer, author, and YouTuber, truly has a deep passion for making quilting fun for herself and everyone around her. With her daily YouTube videos and large internet community join her to be inspired to make quilts that you love!
Karla Overland
Sustaining a Creative Business panelist – Karla Overland has combined her background in Graphic Design with 40 years of sewing experience to grow Cherrywood Fabrics into the leader of hand-dyed fabric in the quilting industry. She enjoys the endless possibilities and simplicity of designing with solid color. Karla has a line of quilt patterns, as well as six self-published books about The Cherrywood Challenge. This annual art quilt challenge has grown into a highly anticipated exhibit at venues around the globe.
Andrea Tsang Jackson
Sustaining a Creative Business panelist – Andrea Tsang Jackson is a textile artist, quilt designer, author and educator based in Kjipuktuk/Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada. After working in a range of design fields and settings ranging from architecture to museums, the quilting medium called to her as a way to explore place, belonging, and agency. Andrea maintains both an art practice and a creative business, striving for a symbiotic relationship between the two. Her first book, Patchwork Lab: Gemology, was published by Lucky Spool in 2019.
Latifah Saafir
Sustaining a Creative Business panelist – Latifah Saafir is known for her bold and innovative modern quilts. Combining her training as an engineer with her lifelong passion for sewing, Latifah creates designs that are graphic and contemporary, featuring challenging techniques with meticulous attention to detail. A co-founder of both the Los Angeles Modern Quilt Guild and the worldwide Modern Quilt Guild, Latifah currently teaches workshops to guilds around the country.
Carolyn Friedlander
Add-on event leader –Carolyn Friedlander is a designer working from her hometown of Lake Wales, Florida, an environment she enjoys for its warm weather, few distractions, and potent community of creative folk. In her work, she draws inspiration from features of the Florida landscape–its long leaf pines, palmettos, scrub land, sand, vibrant colors–as well as her background in architecture. Carolyn is an active presence, partnering with industry leaders to reach quilters worldwide. In addition to her full line of quilt patterns and templates, her book, Savor Each Stitch: Studio Quilting With Mindful Design, was published in 2014, and she has designed fabric collections with Robert Kaufman since 2012.
Becky Goldsmith
Add-on event leader –Becky Goldsmith and Linda Jenkins started Piece O’ Cake in 1994 and published more than 30 books and hundreds of patterns, including 7 Blocks of the Month. Linda is mostly retired now while Becky continues writing books and teaching. Her classes are always interesting and informative, with an emphasis on teaching techniques that help you improve your sewing skills without making you crazy. Becky is also a wife, mother, grandmother, and certified yoga instructor who is searching for balance, strength, and happiness in all things.
Heidi Parkes
Add-on event leader – Based in Milwaukee, Heidi’s quilting and mending celebrate the hand, and her works tug at memories and shared experience. Often using specific textiles, like an heirloom tablecloth, bed sheet, or cloth teabag, Heidi adds subtle meaning and material memory from the start. Ever curious, she works with a variety of quilting techniques including visible hand piecing and knots, improvisation, patchwork, and applique. This attention to the hand in her work has led to greater care for her physical hands as well. Heidi is a certified yoga therapist, and shares her sewing and hand yoga with thousands on YouTube and Instagram.
Carole Lyles Shaw
Add-on event leader – Carole is a modern quilt designer, author and workshop teacher who has been an active member of the quilt and fiber art community for over twenty-five years. Carole’s quilts have been exhibited in museums and art shows in the U.S. and internationally. Her modern quilt designs and articles have been published in the Modern Quilt Guild Journal, American Patchwork & Quilting, Patchwork Professional [Germany], Today’s Quilter, Modern Patchwork Magazine, UPPERCASE Magazine and more. Carole is the author of two books on modern quilting: Madly Modern Quilts and Patriotic Modern Quilts.
Susan Shie
Add-on event leader – I’m a life-long diary artist, with a focus on women, current events, social justice, history, spirituality, and ecology. I tell stories that tend to weave personal, group, and world issues together. I hope my art, whether in drawings, writings, or art quilts (combinations of drawings and writings in sewn paintings) can give some help to the efforts to improve life for everyone and everything on Earth, including our gentle planet Herself. I believe that making art and viewing it are both very healing, and as my friend Mary Helen Fernandez Stewart says, that “Art Saves Lives.”
Jane Dunnewold
Add-on event leader – Jane Dunnewold teaches and lectures internationally. She is a recipient of the Quilt Japan Prize, and Gold Prize at the Taegue (Korea) International Textile Exhibition. The San Antonio Art League named Dunnewold Artist of the Year for 2019. In 2020 her archives were acquired by the International Quilt Museum in Lincoln, Nebraska. In 2022 her work was featured in the prestigious QuiltFolk magazine.
Norma Bradley
Reader – Multi-media visual artist/poet Norma Bradley has a passion for quilts. She spent 30 years as a visiting artist in communities and schools inspiring people of all ages to create their own quilt stories with fabric or natural materials and words.
I create quilts because I have a deep respect for its history as a vehicle for personal expression. I enjoy the tactile qualities of cloth. I work intuitively, like the jazz musicians whom I greatly admire. I improvise, always searching for a sense of movement, harmony and balance. I am fascinated by the process of selecting, cutting, joining, applying layers, cutting into layers and creating surface design using the sewing machine as a instrument to create organic shapes and complex textures. Moving with the rhythm of my needle, stitches and images appear giving a new voice to each piece.
Frances O’Roark Dowell
Reader – Frances O’Roark Dowell first combined her love of telling stories and her love of quilting
with her 2016 novel Birds in the Air. She has since published the short story collection,
Margaret Goes Modern and the audiobook, Friendship Album, 1933. She is also the
bestselling author of over twenty novels for young readers, including Dovey Coe, The Secret
Language of Girls, and Hazard.
Laura Hopper
Host – Laura Hopper (she/her) is a quilter, curator, and writer.
She is the Communications Manager and Creative Contributor for Suzy Quilts, a quilt pattern business and blog. She also works as a freelance quilt and textile writer. Her writing has appeared in Tatter, Curated Quilts, Taproot, Craft Industry Alliance, Benzie Design, Quiltfolk, Modern Patchwork, QuiltCon Magazine, and in over 50 museum exhibits. She is also the Exhibits Director for the Social Justice Sewing Academy. Laura is the lead editor and author of the book “Modern Quilts in the Second City: Ten Years of the Chicago Modern Quilt Guild.”
Amy Milne
Host – Amy Milne has been the executive director of the Quilt Alliance since 2006. She has two decades of experience as a nonprofit administrator, educator and artist. Amy has overseen the expansion of the Quilt Alliance’s oral history projects, including the creation of the Go Tell It at the Quilt Show! project, as well as Quilt Alliance events: Quilters Take Manhattan/a Moment and the Not Fade Away: Sharing Quilt Stories in the Digital Age conference.
