Sharon Needles
Quilt Tour: You’re Doing Amazing, Sweetie
First, a sincere thank you to my weird sister in needlework, who invited me to participate in this whole exercise. Because I have a day job, because this is something I do on nights and weekends, I definitely don’t feel…
People over profit
Even though I live in Madison now, my heart still lives with my activist community in Indiana. Over the last ten years or so, organizers across Indiana have been working to generate a grassroots movement by and for the people,…
Project Tour: Embroidered Pillow
I haven’t been embroidering much lately because I caught the quilting bug. In late 2020, I took an excellent online class with Marlee Grace called A Quilt is a Human Thing, an introduction to improv quilting. Along with the instructional…
Quilt Tour: The secret quilts
Man, it was a great summer. There were boats, golf carts, museums, parties, trips. There was sausage making, quilt making, knitting, baking, and a lot of quality time with far flung folks after a couple of years of relative distance…
Purls Before Swine
A lot people struggle with the idea of studying and practicing a craft without monetizing it. I’ve been at this long enough to know that my goal with this website is, AT BEST, to recoup some of the costs that…
Quilt Tour: My First Big Stitch Quilt
I started this quilt with two ideas in mind. I wanted to do a simple, more traditional quilt pattern and I wanted to try big stitch quilting (as an embroiderer, I have a metric ton of DMC thread at my…
Learning to Quilt
Since the pandemic started, I spend a lot of time on social media watching process videos. There’s something soothing about watching people make things with their hands, especially with the soft clicking and rustling of tools and materials, papers, fabric,…
Bread for All and Roses Too
“Bread and Roses” is both a political slogan as well as the title of a poem and song. It’s commonly associated with the successful textile strike in Lawrence, Massachusetts, between January and March 1912, now often referred to as the…
New Threads
I spent much of the pandemic shutdown at home playing video games and learning new fiber arts, and to a lesser degree, trying to learn how to draw so I can better execute some of my embroidery ideas. Because we…