Quilters Calendar & Guild Network

resources for quilt guild volunteers

traditional piecing

Sandy Fitzpatrick

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Home: Cary, North Carolina

Sandy Fitzpatrick of Hissyfitz Designs is an applique quilt pattern designer whose goal is to get as many of the quirky designs, that are spinning around in her head, down on paper for you to enjoy! 

Her fusible applique patterns are full of whimsy and will certainly bring a smile to your face.  Sandy strives to make her full-sized patterns easy to follow and fun to make.  Her classes, which focus on machine applique and free-motion quilting are equally fun. 

Having lived in many places as she and her husband moved around with the Air Force, Sandy currently lives in Cary, North Carolina. Her lectures and workshops are always an informative, fun experience. View her line of patterns and laser cut kits at www.HissyfitzDesigns.com

Sandy presents and teaches via Zoom! Here are some short descriptions, in her own words. For more workshop and presentation information, please visit Sandy’s website:

My most popular workshop is, “You Choose the Project”. Students are allowed to choose any of my applique designs for this fusible machine applique class. I also offer a Free-Motion Quilting workshop to help you reduce that pile of UFOs you have lying around in your sewing studio. 

Zoom Lectures:

My most popular lecture is, “Why Didn’t I Think of That?”  – Tips, tricks, and shortcuts to make your sewing and quilting easier and more enjoyable. How to sew a sleeve to your quilt quickly and easily, tricks to add dimension to your quilts, and organizational tips.

Free-Motion Fun and Facts – Ideas and inspiration to help you along the path of a wonderful, relaxing free-motion experience. How to set up your sewing area and taking the fear out of your quilting.

Facebook:  www.Facebook.com/HissyfitzDesigns

Instagram:  www.Instagram.com/hissyfitzdesigns

Please let Sandy know you found her on The Quilter’s Calendar!

Carol Wilhoit

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Home: Wheaton, Illinois

Carol loves making quilts that incorporate many different fabrics and she enjoys machine quilting (walking foot, free motion, and quilting with metallic thread.)  She enjoys making small quilted projects such as runners, tote bags, zipper bags and pincushions.  Small projects facilitate play with color, design and new techniques with minimal investment in time and materials.  

Carol likes to find ways to make the quilt construction process easier while producing better results. She has also refined techniques for building, organizing, and using a stash that make it a joy to have and to use.  She has been teaching quilting classes for more than a dozen years.  She loves sharing her ideas with others and encouraging students as they try new projects and techniques. She teaches both online and in-person, for quilt guilds and quilt shops, and at quilt shows.  

Get your Stash Together:  Organization for Quilters

Some quilters find that their fabric stash, scraps, quilting tools, books and magazines have become a burden, as they don’t have a good way to manage these precious resources. Knowing how to approach the task helps transform the dreaded stash into a collection that is a delight to use. This lecture provides many practical ideas for making your fabric, tools, thread, books, and magazines readily accessible. Topics include how to fold and store fabric so that it’s easy to view and locate, labeling, using your computer as a tool, and many ideas for actually using your stash. 

Infinite Opportunity:  Quilts Hidden in Your Stash

As quilters, we love to collect beautiful fabrics – yet we don’t always know how to put them all together to make quilts that we love.  The term “scrap quilt” may bring to mind the use of leftovers that don’t look particularly good together.  By contrast, while STASH quilts utilize your stash and scraps, they contain thoughtfully selected materials, and look BETTER because of the variety – not tired because they were created just to use up fabrics.  The lecture addresses several key design principles that make multi-fabric quilts work and includes pairs of quilts to show the impact of incorporating these considerations. Multiple examples of color combinations are provided to give ideas for selecting and using fabrics from your stash to make fabulous multi-fabric quilts. 

Learn more about Carol and find out about her classes and lectures on her Website at : Carol Quilts

Visit Carol’s Instagram page: Carol Quilts 123

Contact Carol via Email: carolquilts123 @ gmail.com [remove spaces]

Be sure to tell Carol that you found her on The Quilters Calendar!

Beth Helfter

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Home: Pepperell, Massachusetts and live online streaming for guilds.

Author, pattern designer, and national quilting instructor Beth Helfter has one rule about quilting – it’s supposed to be fun. Along with her company motto of “Inspired Designs, Relaxed Attitude,” Beth brings visionary designs and techniques to her patterns and exuberance and encouragement to the classroom.

Beth prefers to dig into her stash to create designs and patterns that appeal to her senses of color and value, using as many different fabrics as possible. Keeping to just a few color families in each quilt palette is one of her best tricks to keeping scrappy quilts from getting out of hand but allowing them to sing with tone and movement. Her popular lecture “Consistency in the Chaos” showcases several ways of looking at categories of scraps as it seeks to inspire quilters to think about scrap quilts and pull fabrics to make them shine without overwhelming the eye. Beth has decided she will never solve the mystery of why even scrap quilters can never use up their fabrics, and no longer even tries.

Her penchant for scraps and her need to use as many fabrics as possible in her quilts led her in 2017 to develop the Accordion Sewn HSTs™ method of creating half square triangles that don’t have a match and yet waste no fabric. Delving into the method further, she discovered “ordering” the accordions could lead to the creation of whole blocks and quilts from a single accordion.

Her first book on the method “Oompah! Jazz Up Your Scrap Quilts With Accordion Sewn HSTs™” was published in 2018, and “Another Round of Oompah” was published in 2020. It’s been called “life-changing,” “magical,” “addictive,” and, her favorite, “witchcraft,” and is the basis for her “Oompah! Accordion Sewn HSTs™ lecture and many of her most popular workshops. She’s currently at work on new variations of the basic Accordion Sewn HSTs™ for patterns and workshops.

As a traveling quilt teacher, she’s taught for guilds coast to coast, and never tires of the ah-ha moments and banter of a classroom full of quilters.

Visit Beth’s website: EvaPaige Quilts

Visit Beth’s YouTube Channel: EvaPaige Quilt Designs

Email Beth: evapaigequilts @ charter.net (remove spaces)

Here’s Beth’s portion of an interview among national quilt teachers done in May 2020:


Please let Beth know you found her on The Quilter’s Calendar!

Julia Graves

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Home: Leesburg, Virginia

Julia Graves is a Zoom-experienced lecturer and teacher on a variety of quilting subjects, with a focus on color and design that are applicable to all your future quilts. 

Her Amazing Abstracts class teaches how to use color and value to create amazing movement and drama.  Her traditional piecing classes that focus on color and value include Tricks with Transparencies, Luscious Luster, Rainbow Drops and Shimmering Triangles.   Other fun classes include creating your own gemstone in Gemstone Bling and Color Exploration where we play with color to see the effects we can achieve.  She has lectures on Color, Design, Landscape Quilts, Personalizing and Memory Quilts, Community and Faith in Fiber and her very popular My Quilting Journey.

Let There Be Light

Julia’s two most popular bookings are:

  • Color Exploration Lecture – This lecture will discuss how to select beautiful color combinations for your quilts and provide tips on how to fix color combinations that just don’t seem to be working.  Includes a slide show and trunk show illustrating classic color combinations and fascinating color illusions.
  • Amazing Abstracts Class – Create an abstract quilt that has amazing movement and drama. Go from inspiration to a simple sketch, then have fun “coloring” your sketch with bits of fabric to create a mock-up of your design – see before you sew!  The design is gridded and blocks are foundation pieced using an easy sew and flip method with room for creativity and improvisation.  Lots of discussion of design principles and how to use color and value to create the drama and desired effects.  

Julia started her quilting business, Special Occasion Quilts LLC, in 2007 and teaches, lectures, designs patterns, makes commission quilts, longarms for others and sells & services APQS longarm machines.  She won Best Longarm Machine Workmanship Wall Quilt Category at the 2016 Mid-Atlantic Quilt Festival, is a Gem Affiliate teaching the gorgeous gem patterns by MJ Kinman – Textile Artist, has had quilts published in books by Gloria Loughman, Katie Pasquini-Masopust and MJ Kinman, was an Artist in Residence at Empty Spools in 2019, and will be teaching at Empty Spools in 2021 and 2022 and Hudson River Valley Art Institute in 2022.  

Julia has been sewing since she was ten and always loved fabric, needle arts and the entire creative process.  She did her apprenticeship as a quilter by making a quilt for each of her nieces and nephews (and thinks she should have counted them before making this promise – there were 32!).  She has since made more quilts than she can count, many for charity, and is partial to scrap quilts and working with color to achieve amazing results. 

Visit her gallery on her website at http://www.soquilts.com.  Contact Julia viat email –juliagraves82 @ gmail.com. Julia has videos of her on this page: http://soquilts.com/classes-and-lectures/

Be sure to tell Julia that you found her on The Quilters Calendar!

Bunnie Cleland

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Home: Chesapeake, Virginia, or traveling in our Motorhome; We will be traveling nation-wide

Bunnie Cleland is a long-time crafter and sewist (sewing artist). She fell in love with quilting in 2006, after her mother dragged her to a quilt show and 9 store shop hop. She was hired at a local quilt shop before she even finished her first quilting class…though she did go on to finish 12 quilts that first year! 

Her Triangle Frenzy business started by accident in 2013 when she arranged some triangles into a quilting project and was prompted to translate her efforts into patterns. High demand for the patterns, by quilters, retailers, and fabric companies, resulted in the global distribution of Triangle Frenzy, designs that produce several visually stunning quilting projects including table runners, table toppers, lap quilts, and bed quilts.

As a former Navy Electronics Technician and Naval Nuclear Power Plant operator, she understands the importance of precision and accuracy. She discovered she has the talent for translating complex written directions into easy-to-follow instructions. This aided her in the creation of Triangle Frenzy’s detailed, step-by-step illustrations for experienced beginners and intermediate level quilters.

She’s also able to use her technical background in teaching sewing techniques to students, guiding them through the creative process that will help them succeed at quilting.

Bunnie’s most popular presentations include:

 “Quilter’s Consultant”

Bring your questions, puzzles, conundrums, and unfinished projects and find options and solutions. Includes a sought-after handout tip sheet.

“Creativity, Organization, Scraps and Quilts”

The title says it all. Includes tips, and the sought-after handout tip sheet.

On the rare occasions when she’s not quilting, she enjoys photography, digital scrapbooking, trading pins, her new Motor Home, and organizing just about anything. She and her retired husband live in Chesapeake, Virginia, and have two grown children.

Bunnie is known for her Triangle Frenzy, find out more on her website Triangle Frenzy

Email: bunnie @ trianglefrenzy.com (remove spaces)

Please let Bunnie know that you found her on The Quilters Calendar!

Barb Eikmeier

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Home: Lansing, Kansas

Barbara J. Eikmeier (Barb) has been quilting since 1984 and teaching quilting since 1990.

She is the author of four books, published by Martingale and Co, including “Back Basting Applique Step by Step”, has designed seven fabric collections for Paintbrush Studio Fabrics and is a Bluprint instructor (formerly Craftsy).

In 2016 she became the authorized distributor for the Magic Triangle Ruler. Married to a retired army officer, she has lived in several regions of the US and South Korea. Barb considers herself a traditional quilter and although appliqué is her favorite quilting technique she also offers programs on sashings, random block samplers, solids, and other traditional quilting techniques. She lives in Lansing, KS with her husband Dale and two dogs and is pleased to now offer all regular lectures as virtual programs.

Barb has announced a retirement date: November 2024. I saw Barb do a trunk show via Zoom on July 11, 2020 and she was MARVELOUS! Hire her fast before her calendar fills up! ~Marguerita

From Barb’s Trunk Show for The Applique Society in July 2020. Used with permission.

Find out more about Barb on her website and drool over her quilts at https://www.barbsfavorites.com/

Be sure to tell Barb that you found her on The Quilters Calendar!

Stephanie Hackney

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Home: Austin, Texas

Stephanie Hackney is a world-traveling branding professional and professional speaker who’s known for her expertise on batting (wadding).

Stephanie has shared her knowledge through lectures at many major quilting industry shows and events, including: Quilt Market, Quilt Festival, Road to California and AQS Spring Paducah (as well as numerous other AQS events).

She has also provided batting education to the members of numerous guilds in North America, as well as to customers of numerous retail stores, and she is often called upon to share this education (and sales training) to industry sales teams.

She serves as the director of sales and marketing for Hobbs Bonded Fibers, an industry leader in non-woven textiles manufacturing, and has made it her mission to provide quilters, sewers and crafters with the knowledge they need to choose the best batting option(s) to garner the results they desire in their quilted, sewn and crafted projects.

The lecture she offers, ‘Batting: What’s Inside Matters,’ is presented via a 1-hour lecture and customization of the information is possible.

For more information on Stephanie’s professional background, please visit her LinkedIn profile: https://www.linkedin.com/in/stephaniehackney

Please let Stephanie know that you found her on The Quilters Calendar.

Candace Hassen

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Home: Porterdale, Georgia

My favorite things about making quilts are color relationships, and repeated geometric patterns.

My design ideas come from everywhere including, the nature, textiles and artwork from other cultures, as well as vintage quilts.

I prefer making scrap quilts because I believe they are much richer, and more interesting to look at. They are also versatile, and will add a beautiful focal point, or unique accent to a wider variety of rooms. Most of my quilts are pieced.

I have a Bachelor’s degree in Art, and have been weaving for 30 years.  Both have had a big influence on the way I use color and geometric pattern in my quilts.

I am available to teach quilting classes, and to present trunk shows to quilt guilds.

I have written patterns for many of my quilt designs.

I would love the opportunity to come and meet your guild!

Please visit my website at http://quiltdesignsbycandace.com and my blog at http://quiltdesignsbycandace.blogspot.com/

Please tell Candace that you found her on The Quilters Calendar!