Quilter’s fabric artwork tells a story

There’s a story behind every quilt that Linda Hanson has labored to make inside her studio in Marion.

A wall hanging featuring Santa Claus was hand stitched as she sat in the hospital while her daughter was recovering from transplant surgery. A red, white and blue quilt reminiscent of the American flag lists the details of her father’s Army career. An artistic quilt inspired by a photo features her son, who is a fisheries biologist, holding a fish.

Quilting for decades, Hanson shares the stories behind her quilts, but she also shares her time working alongside friends sewing together and her passion for quilting with anyone who wants to learn themselves.

“Quilting is addictive,” she said. “It's so much fun and there are so many different kinds of quilting. So it's not the same thing over and over and over again. You can do applique, you can do paper piecing, you can do wool quilting. There are so many different patterns you can do. It’s just endless.”

Hanson is the featured quilter for the Flathead Quilters Guild annual quilt show that runs Sept. 15-16 at the Flathead County Fairgrounds.

While honored to be the featured quilter, she admits to being reluctant to accept the recognition that comes with her own display booth at the show. It was the encouragement of her husband and children that helped her accept.

“They are one very talented group of ladies,” she said of the guild. “I am so honored to be in this position. It took me a while to even say yes, because it's like ‘No, I can't, I'm not that good.”

Inside her roughly three-car garage size studio near her home, Hanson puts in hours machine and hand sewing her quilts. She often hosts groups of friends for sewing days. Each year she and a friend make a quilt with the same pattern working together.

Saying there’s many friendships that come from quilting, along the way she’s learned from those around her and passed along her own knowledge. There isn’t one of her finished quilts that doesn’t have a mistake, but she learned from each one.

“There's so many different types of quilting and somebody in the guild can help you learn whatever you want to learn,” she said. “It's really a group of women that want to pass quilting on. They're not trying to keep it a secret.”

Before retiring from working in education, Hanson was an aide at the Marion School and the Evergreen Junior High. Her favorite was the summer quilting program she taught at Evergreen for middle school and high school-aged students. Students worked through all the steps of making their own quilt from selecting fabrics to sewing the binding on the quilt.

Hanson made sure that students completed the work themselves telling them that if she were to take over at the sewing machine the project would no longer be their own.

“So if they did something that wasn't perfect, I would just ask them if that was something they could live with. If you can live with it, then great, there’s nothing wrong with that. If not, then I can show you how to fix it,” she said. “And at that age not having to be perfect makes a big difference.”

Flipping through photos of her quilts, Hanson recalls the details around each fabric artwork. A forest of trees design was made for her brother to replace the quilt she made him decades ago that became threadbare. A colorful quilt was pieced together using fabrics she purchased on a trip to Hawaii. Fashioned from shirts a quilt became a memory quilt for a grandchild who didn’t get to meet their grandfather.

Some projects Hanson selected to learn. One hand applique design — which involves needlework where pieces of fabric are cut into shapes and then sewn onto another piece of fabric — she selected to challenge herself.

“I thought if I can do that one then I can call myself a quilter,” she said. “Each one of those techniques in the blocks I had not done before. It took me probably 10 years just because I really didn’t know what I was doing. And so that one is called ‘I Can Quilt.’”

The Flathead Quilters Guild annual quilt show runs Sept. 15-16 at the Flathead County Fairgrounds. The theme is Stars and Stripes Forever: A Tribute to Our Armed Forces.

The show runs 9:30 a.m. to 5 p.m. on Friday, Sept. 15 and 9:30 a.m. to 4 p.m. on Saturday, Sept. 16. Admission is $7 per day or a two-day pass is $10.

For more information, visit flatheadquilters.org.

Features Editor Heidi Desch may be reached at 758-4421 or hdesch@dailyinterlake.com.