Hello.

I feel it is high time I actually do something with this space. With the current social media trends so fleeting, it might be nice to return to long-form writing!

Who even is this?

Hi. I’m Kristy.

I’m a lot of things. Mother of two teenage boys, married my high school sweetheart, serial crafter, and life-long learner. I’ve been a graphic designer, illustrator, drawer, painter, knitter, spinner, dyer, stuffed animal maker, this and that do-er. Whatever creative outlet passes by me, I’m game to try it out. I’m currently into watching people build minature dioramas on YouTube, and utterly fascinated! These days, however, I’ve settled into being here for all your quilting needs!

5 random fun facts about me:

I played the oboe in high school. I’d love to get back into it, but I am extremely rusty. and after a couple of years of my kid playing it, my ancient oboe might be ready for the band class in the sky.
My sole athletic claim to fame was one season of being in a bowling league as a kid. I won the award for the most improved bowler. (In the first game, I hit 5 pins. Final game? 30. I’m even better now!
I went to school in Calgary for a semester. The winter one. It was cold, even for me, but I really discovered I loved Canada, and would move back in a heartbeat if I could
A couple of friends and I once got lost in the woods surrounding the Lillehammer Olympic Village. Honestly, we’re super lucky we made it out – by following the sound of someone’s loud music until we got back on the path!
I have three published children’s books with my name on them. One as the illustrator, and two more as art director having done various design tasks.

My Origin Story

I never set out to be a quilter.

Fiber arts were never even on my radar, really, except as perhaps a fun pastime, I knit for a quite awhile during college and dabbled in spinning. If I had space for a full sized spinning wheel, I’d totally pick it back up!

As a kid, I wanted to be a painter. Which evolved into a desire to be an animator as a teen, and I finally settled on graphic designer/illustrator as a young adult in art school. (Animation, it turns out, is HARD.) Books, especially children’s books, were going to be my future. I could just picture all the little kiddos being read books with my illustrations, excited about this or that character, falling in love with reading because of my illustrations. (never mind the story that went with my pictures!) So, I graduated with my BFA in 2006, majoring in illustration from the Minneapolis College of Art and Design. I was ready to bust out my portfolio to anyone who would look at it. Landed a couple of freelance jobs, and bounced from place to place, as my education prepared me. But as always, life has other plans.

I.E. babies.

When I fell pregnant with my oldest, my mother, in all her motherly wisdom, gifted me a quilt kit and a sewing machine for Christmas. (it was a $99 big box store special!) I was..surprised. I hadn’t really had much desire to do any sewing, beyond the shorts we had made in middle school home economics. But I was in between some freelance work, and honestly having an exceedingly hard time juggling my constant hunt for work and the idea of being a mother, so I figured I might as well learn to use the machine.

But the quilt kit was not made for beginners. It was a mixture of low-quality big box store cotton, flannel, and minky. And it wasn’t even to my taste as far as quilts go, even then. So I read the relevant bits of the instructions (use a quarter-inch seam), promptly threw them away, and started cutting. I think I made a couple of 9 patches, really just messing around with the machine to see what it could do and how to control it.

It wasn’t long before I got frustrated with the Minky (who puts Minky in a beginner kit anyways!) and took myself off to the nearest big box craft store to pick out some prints to make a baby quilt for my rapidly approaching son. I probably bought a handful of the cheapest fat quarters, along with a yard of a “focal print” because that was the advice of the day, according to my very basic research online. I didn’t have a pattern in mind, so I likely vastly overbought. I still occasionally find scraps in my bins from that first project.

But I was hooked. The fabric section of that big-box craft store was just so…MAGICAL. so many colors…quilts weren’t the brown/beige muted colors I remember from my grandmother’s house. There was a whole vast world of big, bright beautifully designed quilts out there. I quickly discovered the very beginnings of the Modern Quilt movement percolating online and saw the possibilities.

And they were ENDLESS

Utilitarian. Traditional. Modern. ART.

Quilts could be anything I wanted them to be.

And so my Quilting Journey truly began. I’ve been a part of the making of well over a hundred quilts in the past 17 years. I’ve grown as an artist and as a quilter, never stopping, always questioning, always learning.

I eventually brought my mother into the quilting world, and in 2018, we purchased a Handi Quilter Amara, and jumped head first into a new set of adventures, learning a new skill set in longarming, starting (and growing!) a business. I’ve felt connected to a rich history of quilters and makers and made new communities full of wonderful humans who also carry on the traditions of quilting.

This year, I have branched out and now own this business fully on my own. I’m sure there’ll be some ups and downs, but I have some AMAZING plans for the next few years. I cant WAIT to share them!

Now let’s go make some quilts!