We had the opportunity to interview Meryl Ann Butler, author of 90 Minute Quilts, and pick her brain about her experiences with quilting. With a new book on the way, nothing is stopping Meryl Ann from living her dreams. If you would like to know more about Meryl Ann visit her website. For more information on the book 90 Minute Quilts, published by Krause Publications, click here.
Q. Did you always know you wanted to be a quilter?
A. No, I knew I wanted to be an artist since before I was in kindergarten. For 7 years I studied under traditional realist painter, Harold R Stevenson, a student of Norman Rockwell, and later I ran my own art school for a decade. I learned how to sew in 4-H club, when I was in 5th grade.
Q. How/When did you get into quilting?
A. In 1982, when I lived in Louisiana, my husband and daughter and I went to NY to visit my parents. We all went to see “Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat” on Broadway, it was fabulous! I loved the idea of Joseph having his empowering dreams and visions stitched onto something he could wear. I had some powerful visions that were meaningful to me, and I had planned to paint them, but after seeing this costume, I wanted to wear them! But I didn’t know how to quilt, so I wondered how I could learn.
Q. What was your first official finished or failed quilt project?
A. When I returned from that trip to NY, (to my very small town in Louisiana) I discovered that, in my absence of only about 10 days, a quilt shop had opened up just 2 blocks away. And their first class was how to make a quilted jacket! So in class, I made my daughter a little quilted jacket in order to learn the process. At home I worked on my own jacket with the images from my visions. The week after the class ended, I entered my daughter’s jacket in the county fair, and won first place!
Q. What is your favorite part of quilting?
A. Designing, working with color, playing with cool new fabrics and products.
Q. Where do you get your inspirations?
A. I don’t know, they just come stampeding into my head, nonstop!
Q. How does your family handle your quilting?
A. My kids are grown, I live alone now. But when they were at home, I think the part that they liked best was that they could work in my studio (for pay) almost any time they needed money! I always had kits to assemble, fabric to fold, pins to pick up. And I always thought it was good for the kids to see me being creatively engaged, and being interviewed for TV or magazines, because it let them see some fun possibilities for their own lives. I had the best of all worlds – I got to have creative fun everyday in my job, which was at home, so I was also there for the kids.
Q. Is your daughter becoming a quilter?
A. I taught my daughter, Angelica, how to quilt in 1984, when she was 7. She exhibited a small quilt in our quilt guild’s show when she was 8. I developed an easy technique so that I could teach her, and that eventually became my book, 90-Minute Quilts: 15+ Projects You Can Stitch in an Afternoon. When she took art in school, she really loved to work with her hands, in 3-D, and she loved her pottery class.My daughter will graduate from medical school in May 2009, as a D.O. She loved surgery, and told me one day that the surgeon she was studying with said she did some of the neatest stitching that he had ever seen. When I said that I wasn’t surprised, my daughter asked why. And I responded, “Well, I taught you to sew when you were two!” I also taught my two youngest boys a little about quilting. When a friend’s baby died shortly after birth, they helped me make a little shroud, using my 90-Minute Quilt methods.
Q. Who do you call when you need quilting help?
A. Usually other people are calling me, haha!
Q. Who is your quilting idol?
A. I’m not sure if I have one – I have lots of friends who do great things in quilting, and they inspire me. But I guess I get excited about my own work most of all – because I’m the one having fun doing it!
Q. How have your quilting ideas and styles changed over the years, or have they?
A. Yes, they’ve gotten more elaborate and innovative. My most recent ensemble for the Bernina Fashion Show is an example, with probably thousands of pieces.
Q. What/Who made you decide to make 90-Minute Quilts?
A. I developed the process to teach my daughter how to quilt – and it just mushroomed from there. I taught classes locally, and then across the country – and then finally, about 20 years after I developed the process, I wrote the book.
Q. What was the book creating process like?
A. Labor, only much longer! Ha! But lots of fun, too.
Q. Can you tell us about your next book.
A. I am working on “Australian Spirit: Designer Projects to Quilt, Fuse, and Sew.” Nine other designers and myself each offer a chapter on a project using the fabulous Australian Aboriginal fabrics. (*image below)
Q. What else do you have in the works for the future?
A. A couple more books, at least! And I have a dream to do a quilt project in the Middle East somehow, with Israeli and Palestinian women, making quilts for each other’s children. I think women can stitch up wholeness in this planet, “peace by piece.” I did the First US-Soviet Children’s Peace Quilt Exchange in 1987-88, it was the first time a reciprocal quilt came to the U.S. from the former USSR. And I was also faculty advisor for the “Anti-Apartheid: Love for All Mankind” quilt, now in the collection of the Hon. Nelson Mandela. And I made a healing quilt for Virginia Tech after the shootings, and also one for my daughter who was a student there. Quilts can be so healing to make and to receive - they don’t call quilts “comforters” for nothing!
Q. What keeps you going?
A. Ha, I can’t help myself! Most days I jump out of bed in the morning, and I can’t wait to start working on something fun in my studio!
Special thanks to Meryl Ann for taking the time to share with us her knowledge and enthusiasm. Meryl Ann Butler is a member of our Quilterson.com community. Join now and talk to her and many other quilters on our social network.
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