Her experience, my curiosity. Our artistic muses walk along side with each other. Sharon has sewn for years. I have known how to sew for years. 4H in Kansas for her, with dresses and more. My mom teaching me anything from replacing buttons to simple sewing by hand and machine. We make a great team, whether hiking or quilting.

A place called Missouri Star Quilts sprang up in the home town of J C Penney in northern Missouri, near St Joseph. If you go there, your typical view of the customer base is female, in an increasingly large age range. Men are often the chauffeurs for their wives. A ‘man cave’ is set up to allow the men to rest while fortunes are tossed to the winds in hours of fabric browsing. I haven’t been typical in visiting this midwestern wonderland or other fabric, craft and quilting stores through the years.

Quilting shops, especially, dangled carrots of interest before my eyes. Instead of finding a bench and waiting, as many men do, I participated and even ventured into my own tangents of creativity and curiosity. Such stores held a captivating type of machine, somewhere between a sewing machine, a large woodshop power tool, and the yoke of an airplane. Sharon had to draw me away from these behemoth machines called long arm quilters. I was hooked.

As with many couples, our contributions are complimentary with each other. Sharon tends to be the one to piece together immaculate and precise pieces in construction of quilts, among her other sewing projects. I now come along, and with my APQS Lucey quilter, form sewing patterns that ultimately hold the decorative top to the backing fabric and an internal warming – and 3D texture-producing – batting. The three come together, as our mutual roles in producing the quilt. The quilting completes the story of the quilt top.

You’ll hear of our quilting endeavors as well as hiking adventures in these posts. If you are interested in more of that direction, check out our Quilt and Trail by Rollie page in Facebook.