Mary Ellen von Holt of Little Quilts
March 31st, 2010
I’m thrilled to be featured as a guest blogger! Quilting has always been such a relaxing past time for me. In 1976 I was working on a needle point picture of Mickey Mouse commemorating the 500 year anniversary of the bicentennial. I was flipping through Family Circle magazine and came across a picture of a quilt made by Jinny Beyer called “Rising Sun.” The magazine had quilt blocks in it and I started making 9 patch and half square triangle blocks mimicking the ones shown in the magazine. I followed the magazine for months and taught myself how to cut squares and triangles and figured out how to turn them into patchwork blocks. I continued to make patchwork from the magazine and bought whatever books I could find on patchwork. I sewed blocks until we moved to Atlanta in 1981. I guess you could say the rest is history.
Little Quilts started with Alice Berg, Sylvia Johnson and myself. Alice, Sylvia and I started making little quilts to sell in the early 1980s. We saw a room setting in one of our country decorating magazines that had small doll quilts hanging on walls or as accents in cupboards or end tables. We loved the look and feel these small doll quilts created, however, they were very expensive so we decided to study books that had antique doll quilts and try to make them ourselves. We made them for ourselves, gave them away as gifts to our friends and we sold them at antique fairs and festivals.

We set up an outdoor clothes line that had the quilts hanging on it and tagged each one with a little story about how they came to be. Over the years we sold more than 500 of these doll quilts. They were not miniature quilts. They were made with squares of fabric never smaller than 1″ and usually the quilt blocks were about 5″. In miniature quilts, the block are usually 3″ or smaller.















