Harriet started quilting seriously in 1974, working alongside her mom. Her early quilting career included producing baby quilts for craft shows and teaching adult education classes. In 1981, Harriet opened her quilt shop, Harriet’s Treadle Arts. Her specialties at the time were free-motion embroidery, machine arts, and machine quilting.
In 1982, Harriet attended one of Mary Ellen Hopkins’s seminars. Mary Ellen’s streamlined techniques and innovative design ideas led Harriet to a new way of thinking, which caused her to give up the machine arts and to teach only quilting. Today, she is world renowned for being a true “mover and shaker” in the quilt world. In the late 1990s, she was voted one of the “88 Leaders of the Quilt World.”
Harriet created and inspired a whole new generation of machine quilters with her bestselling book Heirloom Machine Quilting, which has enjoyed 22 continuous years in print. She is also the author of Mastering Machine Appliqué and From Fiber to Fabric, and co-author of The Art of Classic Quiltmaking. She is responsible for a myriad of products pertaining to machine quilting, and she has developed batting with Hobbs Bonded Fibers and designed fabric for P&B Textiles.
Carrie has been around quilting all her life—sitting in Harriet’s lap as a baby while Harriet sewed, learning her colors with machine embroidery thread and her alphabet on the cams of Harriet’s old Viking sewing machine. She didn’t have a chance not to be involved! Harriet and her mother opened the store when Carrie was four years old, and she spent a part of nearly every day of her life at the store. Carrie’s interests in college turned to range management and wildlife biology, but no matter what, she always came home to quilting as a hobby.
In 2006, Harriet decided she wanted to close the store. She was tired after running it for 25 years as well as traveling and teaching at the same time. Carrie couldn’t imagine not having the store as a part of her life. So she moved back to Colorado and now runs the store full-time while finishing her master’s thesis, “The Physical Properties of Quilting Thread.”
Most of all, Carrie is proud to carry on the family legacy of quilting that extends from her great-great-grandmother Phoebie Frazier, to her great-grandmother Harriet Carey, to her grandmother Harriet (Fran) Frazier, to her mom, Harriet. Quilting is all about tradition (no matter how you make a quilt) and about the love of creating something beautiful from fabric and thread with your own hands.
All the quilts in the book were pieced and quilted by Harriet and Carrie. They truly believe that if you are going to teach it, you had better be able to make it!