Georgia Bonesteel quilts (often!)

I meant to link to this article on Highland Lake resident Georgia Bonesteel when it first appeared in the Times-News, but better late than never:

Quilting and friendship go hand in hand — so much so that Georgia Bonesteel, the nationally renowned godmother of lap quilting, still stitches with the Cover Lovers, a group that evolved from one of her classes at Blue Ridge Community College more than 30 years ago.

“We’ve been meeting twice a month for 31 years,” Bonesteel says. “We meet in homes, attend events and continue to learn together.” She has also been instrumental in starting several larger quilting groups in North and South Carolina.

Bonesteel’s devotion to her craft and her passion for learning propelled her from a classroom at BRCC, where she taught beginning sewing, to national exposure as the creator of the TV series “Lap Quilting with Georgia Bonesteel,” which ran on PBS stations for 30 years and still airs on Create TV. She has also written nine books, authored numerous magazine articles, developed new quilting patterns and designed quilt fabrics.

At age 76, Bonesteel is still innovating, and she remains a popular quilting demonstrator for the Southern Highland Craft Guild and for the John C. Campbell Folk School in Brasstown, where she has taught since 1995....

In 1979, she showed her quilts to producers at PBS, and a career was launched. “We did a total of 12 series with 13 shows each,” Bonesteel says. “Each series had a book that went along with it, some of which are on my website.

She attributes the popularity of her craft, in part, to its flexibility.

“Lap quilting enables people to quilt on the go, to take sections with them and not be tied down to one large project,” Bonesteel says. “I didn’t start it. I just showed people another way to make a quilt.” Sections of a layered quilt can be quilted individually and then joined, or a basted quilt can be quilted, one area at a time, usually in a hoop....

Bonesteel has recently designed “Grid Grip,” a product printed with quarter-inch squares or triangles that allow a quilter to design on freezer paper.

“You can design on the paper and mark what piece matches another. It makes quilting more like a puzzle where A meets A and B meets B,” Bonesteel explains. And she markets it through a 21st-century venue — her website, www.georgiabonesteel.com.

“There is a huge global interest in quilts,” Bonesteel says. “There are major conventions and symposia throughout the world.”

But despite changes in communications and technology, threads of history and tradition run strong through this craft.

Perhaps the best example is one of Bonesteel’s recent creations — a quilt that is a collaboration with her great-grandmother, who died in Portage, Ohio, in the 1940s....

Read it all.