Guest Blogger: Cathleen Savage, Quilt My Phone

Please join me in welcoming today’s guest, Cathleen Savage from Quilt My Phone. She’s sharing her quilting story and her newest venture of putting quilt images on cases for phones, tablets, and laptops. Plus, you can win one for yourself too… details below.

Hello quilters! I’m thrilled to be blogging as a guest on the Quilting Gallery!

My grandmother taught me to knit, crochet, embroider, and do crewel work and my mom taught me how to piece a nine-patch block. My first block was made in the 1970s from 4″ squares of orange and turquoise, matched with psychedelic prints! My memory recreates it like this:

In college, I studied painting, printmaking, and art history. After college, I worked in various corporate jobs unrelated to art. I continued to paint as a hobby and I attempted hand quilting. Since I had no real knowledge of the process, my project was only partially successful. I used very thick batting and just about crippled my hand! Later, I had better success making a double wedding ring pillow.

During the 1990s, I stopped into a NYC bookstore where I saw an issue of the now defunct Art Quilt Magazine. I was in love! Soon after that, I discovered Robert Shaw’s The Art Quilt, and Penny McMorris’ The Art Quilt, I was hooked for life!

In the late 1990s, I started one of the first online quilt galleries called Quilt Quest. I managed it in my spare time in the evenings after my corporate job. It was so much fun and I got to meet many quilters who are well known today: Hollis Chatelain (she taught me how to use dyes to paint on fabric and I bought one of her quilts, which now resides in the National Quilt Museum!), Caryl Bryer Fallert (she sold one of her pieces through my gallery), Ann Harwell (I made greeting cards from her quilt designs), and many more wonderful quilt artists. I had to give it up when I took a new position that required all of my time but the passion for quilts never went away.

Here is a detail from one of my own art quilts, “Edwardian Dream”:

In 2010 I left the corporate world and moved to Colorado. I love living here and I finally have time to do things just for pleasure! That means quilts! My newest venture, and one that I hope the quilting world will embrace, is an effort to increase the reach of quilts in popular culture by putting quilt images on cases for phones, tablets, and laptops.

The company, Quilt My Phone, sells cases featuring vintage and contemporary quilts from the collections of museums and quilt artists. One of the most rewarding aspects of this business is that a portion of each sale is paid to the museum or quilter. I love being able to give back to a community that has been a source of pleasure to me for so many years.

Please stop by and take a look at some of the beautiful cases from the Rocky Mountain Quilt Museum and the Bennington Museum, as well as several contemporary quilt artists at Quilt My Phone.

Give-Away: In honor of Valentine’s Day/Week, I’m giving away to one lucky reader, a case featuring the pink 1880 Kansas Sunflower Quilt shown above. Visit my blog to enter! Hurry contest ends Saturday Feb. 18th.

If you like what you see, share the link with your quilting friends, blog about it, or, better yet, buy a case for yourself or a friend. You’ll be shopping for a good cause!

Thanks, Michele, for letting me be a guest blogger.