Introducing Carol Hood of Prescott

My earliest memoryof quilting, as a young child, was sitting on the lawn on a hot summers day with my Grandmother Grace cutting patches for her quilt.  She hand pieced but had the church ladies quilt them and continued to piece and sew into her later years.  I have a newspaper picture of her and her quilting group in Florida.  My mother didn't sew at all.

In the 60's I started sewing clothes for my children and graduated to sewing more complicated garments when I was a member of Sweet Adelines.  And when I discovered quilting, the garment sewing gradually stopped.

Around the time of the bicentennial, two young women at our church took a quilting class and thought it would be a great idea to quilt tops for folks to establlish a fund for new choir robes.  The mother of one of our members started us out on this endeavor.  We were quilte successful and had many interesting experiences with this venture!  I don't remember exactly how I learned to hand quilt but spent several years doing it with this group until I decided that I'd better learn how to piece after I did everything wrong on my first quilt.  So I was off to the Community Education class.

Quilting in Michigan was not very organized in the early 80's but I did take several classes and attended a quilt seminar at Oakland University in Rochester where I found a small group of quilters in my area.  At this time of scissor cutting and cardboard templates, I was doing everything by hand and hand work is still my favorite method of meditation.  I don't machine quilt but now I do machine piece as well as hand piece.  Most of my work is hand quilted and I have a passion for applique.

When we retired to Arizona in 1987, I immediately joined Mountain Top Quilters and met another newcomer, Penny Bolerjack, who opened "Quilt Crossing" in Prescott and I worked in her shop and taught hand quilting and applique there for about ten years.

Soon after we arrived in Prescott, I was invited to join a small group of hand quilters who were also excelled  at applique.  We made quilts for each other.  I entered the quilt that we made for me, "Cherry Basket", in the 1994 AQS contest in Paducah, KY and won first place in the group category.

Quilting has been my "bliss" for 30 years.  I belong to Mountain Top Quilters, Arizona Quilt Study Group, American Quilt Study Group, American Quilters Society.  I am an original member of the Heritage Quilt Study Group of Sharlot Hall Museum that was organized in 1992 to study quilts.

Heritage Quilt Study Group makes quilts for the museum and an opportunity quilt once a year.  We also hold quilt documentations for the community and the results are available from the archives of the Sharlot Hall Museum.   If you visit, you will see quilts that we made on the beds in the Fremont House and the Governor's Mansion.  I was also a guest co-curator for the Museum's fourteen month long quilt exhibit in 1995-1996.

Being a traditional quilter with a love of reproduction fabric and quilt history, it has been a privilege to have won several state and local awards.

My journey in quilting is continuing as I try to step out of my "box" to explore new ideas in our stitching and art world but my focus will still probably be on antique quilts and hand techniques.