About Me

My name is Sheila H. and I live in southern Illinois.  As a child, my father would help me draw designs on tea towels and my mother would help me embroider them.  There has been a needle of some sort or another in my hand ever since.  I have a college degree in Drafting and Design.  In the 1980's Georgia Bonesteel had a television series on quilting and she inspired me to make my first quilt.  It was truly awful, but I finished it.  (Age hasn't improved it any.)  In the mid 1990's, some vintage fabric scraps came my way.  The tiny prints were fascinating to me and I didn't want to waste the scraps, so I made my first doll quilt.  My husband Vern said, "Well, that is the cutest thing I ever saw."  He returned from his next business trip with a doll bed for the quilt.  The bed was actually nicer than the quilt, so another quilt was made and that was how it all started.  Along the way, my interest in antique fabrics grew.  A chance conversation with Mary Koval focused my attention and a miniature quilt series was born.  This series would be made of only antique fabrics, the age of the fabrics and the style of quilt would be compatible, the quilts would all be approximately the same size, they would all be hand pieced and hand quilted and I would do my very best work on them all.  The first two quilts in this series were acquired by the International Quilt Study Center and Museum in Nebraska.  Xenia Cord, who was the head of Procurements at the time, later told me that the board created a whole new category for my quilts. Vern was so thrilled that he bought me an artist's portfolio to hold the quilt series and that is why it is called the Portfolio Series.  I continue to work on it.  One of the more recent? quilts, a Mariner's Compass, is now in the National Quilt Museum in Paducah, Kentucky.  After the Mariner's Compass, the museum acquired another one of my quilts. It was a gift to them from Gerald Roy.  It is four appliqued blocks with piced borders.