Home: West Newbury, Massachusetts
Amy Friend is a former museum curator turned designer. She designs modern quilts and specializes in paper pieced designs. Amy is also known for her fussy cutting and intentional piecing.
She authored the books Intentional Piecing (2016) and Improv Paper Piecing: A Modern Approach to Quilt Design (2017), and has a new book, Petal + Stem (2020).
Since 2019, Amy has run a paper pieced Block of the Month program each year. She is an award winning quilter and her quilts have been exhibited at a number of quilt shows as well as museums. Amy visits quilt guilds to speak about her quilts and to teach workshops. For those who can’t attend a workshop, Amy now offers online workshops for individuals.
Those can be found on her website at https://duringquiettime.com/online-workshops. Amy also offers programming virtually through Zoom. Please find a comprehensive list of lectures and workshops at https://duringquiettime.com/teaching-and-lectures.
Amy lives in Massachusetts with her husband and three children. If she isn’t sewing or spending time with the family, you might find her in the garden. You can follow her creative path on her blog, www.duringquiettime.com or on Instagram @duringquiettime.Quilt
Below: Variation of Daisy Chain from her book, Petal + Stem
An Introduction to the Modern Quilting Aesthetic. This approximately one hour lecture uses Amy’s quilts to introduce quilters to the characteristics of modern quilting as defined by the Modern Quilt Guild. Participants will learn about modern traditionalism, minimalism, negative space, alternate gridwork, improvisation and more.
Improv Paper Piecing: This approximately one hour lecture is based on a new approach to design that Amy presents in her second book, Improv Paper Piecing: A Modern Approach to Quilt Design. She shares quilts that illustrate how to approach paper pieced design improvisationally to create unique, modern quilts. (an on demand workshop by the same title is also available).
I selected Amy’s lecture/trunk show “Improv Paper Piecing” for our guild. As much as we wanted to go digital, none in our guild had used Zoom. Amy assured us that her presentation would work in the zoom platform and she guided me on how to use it. Everything went perfect. Her slide show is well photographed with highlighted photos, she staged her “Zoom Studio” with great lighting, sound and background. We had Q&A via chat and live and for our first “virtual” lecture everything was perfect. We would highly recommend Amy for your guild for online or in person lecture or class. Amy’s lecture was well prepared from content to presentation. Our members were delighted and are now asking if she can come to the guild to teach in person. We all hope that is possible.
AJ Grossman, South Florida Modern Quilt Guild
Please contact Amy at amybfriend @ gmail.com
Please let Amy know that you found her on The Quilters Calendar!