✓Our best-selling online course is back and better than ever! APQS Longarm Certification Sponsored by Quilting Daily has been revised and updated. Not only will you learn how to make beautiful quilts, you’ll also gain skills to turn your passion into a paycheck with tips on how to run your own quilting business.
Tradition Meets Innovation
For someone who has been so strongly associated with traditional scrap quilting for nearly four decades, it’s a little surprising to learn that Judy Martin is a first generation quilter. The resident of Grinnell, Iowa, says that although her mother was a garment sewer, no one in her family quilted. Science and math were the focus in her home when she was growing up: her father was an engineer, her sister went on to a career as a NASA scientist, and her brother ended up working at Boeing. A doll quilt she made at the age of 9 was her sole exposure to quilting during her childhood.
Judy made her first real quilt after coming home from the University of California at Santa Barbara (where she was studying animal behavior) for Thanksgiving in 1969. Her parents had recently moved to a new house and she no longer had a room of her own to stay in. While looking around the house, she found a box of scraps from her mother’s sewing and decided to make a quilt. “I’d never seen a quilt, but I knew my mother always gave our sewing scraps to the people at church who made quilts, so I decided to make one,” she says.
Beginner & Innovator
From the beginning, Judy thought of herself as an innovator. “I thought quilts were all uniform squares, and I thought I would be really revolutionary and use squares and rectangles,” she remembers. She limited her colors to red, white and blue even though she was certain that quilts were supposed to be completely scrappy—another indication, she thought, of her innovative approach to quiltmaking.
Like many quilters, Judy was immediately hooked by that first experience. “After that, whenever I went to the fabric store—I’d sewn for years, so I was always going to the fabric store—whenever I went to the fabric store, all I could see was quilts,” she says. “And I just had to buy the fabric to make the quilts, and then I had to make the quilts.” She continued to quilt throughout the rest of her college career, using techniques she devised on her own.
Designs to Explore
Her illusions of having discovered new ways of quiltmaking disappeared when her sister gave her a copy of Ruby Short McKim’s classic book 101 Patchwork Patterns, which was originally published in 1931. This was Judy’s first introduction to traditional patterns, and she took it hard. “I was kind of devastated,” she says. “I thought, Oh, it’s all been done before! There’s nothing new in the world.”
She kept quilting, though, and made traditional quilts for a number of years before she started to see that there were things that hadn’t already been done and there were, in fact, new designs to explore.
A New Direction
As she approached her 30th birthday, she was ready for a change in her life. She’d been working odd jobs since graduating from college to supplement her income from selling quilts at farmers’ markets, and was feeling that maybe she was disappointing her parents for not having more to show for herself. In search of a new direction, she read the career book What Color Is Your Parachute? and it changed her whole outlook.
“It would never have occurred to me to look for a job that I wanted; I thought you had to look for a job that was available,” she says. “And so I asked for a job at Quilter’s Newsletter magazine. They weren’t looking to hire particularly, but I asked for a job. I decided that’s what I wanted to do.” Her newfound sense of purpose paid off: she started working for Quilter’s Newsletter in 1979.
During the eight years she worked as an editor for QN and its new “little sister” magazine, Quiltmaker, Judy became one of the principal pattern designers on staff in addition to writing features. She also co-wrote books with Bonnie Leman, founder and editor-in-chief of both magazines, which were published by the Lemans’ own imprint Moon Over the Mountain Publishing; in fact, one of Judy’s first assignments was to write Log Cabin Quilts with Bonnie. Within a few years, Judy was the sole author of books such as Scrap Quilts (1985) and Shining Star Quilts (1987).
Life After Leaving the Magazine Business
When she left the magazine business, it was to start a publishing company with her husband, Steve, so she could work from home and start a family. “I did a book, a baby, a book, a baby, and then we thought that was enough of the baby part,” she says. All of her books have been published by their company, Crossley-Griffith Publishing, including her latest, Singular Stars.
Despite not going into a scientific field like her siblings, Judy inherited an engineer’s sensibility from her father. Her patterns are marked by a keen attention to the underlying math of her designs for a high level of precision and accuracy when being made by home quilters.
Her artistic inspiration, though, is one all quilters can relate to. “My designs are all rooted in tradition,” she says. “They’re getting further from traditional as the years go by, but they’re rooted there. People still mistake my designs for traditional patterns a lot.” She shows no signs of slowing down as one of the quilt world’s most prolific designers, with one idea tending to lead to another. As Judy sees it, there’s always a new design “waiting in the wings.”
This feature appears in the September/October 2018 issue of Quiltmaker.
We use cookies to optimize our website and our service.
Functional cookies
Always active
The technical storage or access is strictly necessary for the legitimate purpose of enabling the use of a specific service explicitly requested by the subscriber or user, or for the sole purpose of carrying out the transmission of a communication over an electronic communications network.
Preferences
The technical storage or access is necessary for the legitimate purpose of storing preferences that are not requested by the subscriber or user.
Statistics
The technical storage or access that is used exclusively for statistical purposes.The technical storage or access that is used exclusively for anonymous statistical purposes. Without a subpoena, voluntary compliance on the part of your Internet Service Provider, or additional records from a third party, information stored or retrieved for this purpose alone cannot usually be used to identify you.
Marketing
The technical storage or access is required to create user profiles to send advertising, or to track the user on a website or across several websites for similar marketing purposes.
Join the Conversation!