Featured Artist: Carol HillCarol Hill is our featured artist at the QA 43rd annual Quilt Show to be held March 14-16, 2025. |
Carol Hill with the Award of Excellence in Appliqué from the International Quilt and Fiber Arts Festival 2019 | Growing up in Southern California in the 1950s and ’60s, our Featured Artist Carol Hill had never before seen a quilt when she decided to make one. She had sewn from such an early age that she doesn’t remember learning, making clothes for her dolls on a hand-crank, chain-stitch toy sewing machine. In the summer of 1970, when she was 20 years old and a newly married military spouse at a remote duty station, she bought some embroidery squares at the local dime store to make into a baby quilt for her new nephew. She stitched the squares together in a checkerboard with plain blocks to make a top, sewed it pillow-case style to a polka dot backing, and went back to the dime store for some cotton wadding for thickness. Knowing the filling wouldn’t stay in place over time, she figured she needed some good, strong thread to hold the layers together: she sewed a running stitch through them with button-and-carpet thread. She had invented quilting! The next quilt Carol made was a hand-appliqued, king-size Hawaiian, and she’s been quilting steadily ever since. |
She has made quilts of every kind: traditional, modern, hand- and machine-pieced, hand- and machine-quilted, English paper-pieced, foundation paper-pieced, tied, strip quilted, embroidered, appliquéd, kits, T-shirt quilts, art quilts, crazy quilts, raffle quilts, string quilts, charm quilts, row quilts, I-spy quilts, Quilts of Valor. She designs most of her quilts on graph paper and especially loves working with old blocks – partially finished pieces that allow her to collaborate with quilters she never knew from a bygone day. |
Carol has had quilts juried into the International Quilt Festival in Houston, the American Quilter’s Society show in Paducah, and the International Quilt & Fiber Arts Festival in Everett. She has won numerous ribbons at Washington state fairs, as well as in QA quilt shows. One of her quilts has been accessioned into the permanent collection of the New England Quilt Museum, where it hung in an exhibition this past fall. She designed three of QA’s past raffle quilts, and she designed and sewed our current raffle quilt (buy tickets!). She has served QA as secretary, newsletter editor, and several times as retreat host, and she created and currently heads QA’s Quilting Advisors, which provides counsel and expertise to our members.
Quilting has brought Carol more than 50 years of creative expression, satisfaction, and joy, as well as many friends who have shared her passion and her life. |
“Connections” by Carol Hill |
