Barbara “Bobbi” Lucero learned to sew as a child while visiting her paternal grandmother on the San Carlos Apache Reservation in Arizona during the summers.
“She would make quilts, but she would do random patches, you know, back then, and then use the yarn to tie them all together,” Bobbi remembered.
Bobbi’s grandmother, Agnes Pechuli, who was a San Carlos Apache Native American, would hand her scraps and point her to an old sewing machine, where Bobbi would make simple things, like doll blankets. “[My grandmother] would also sew all her own dresses,” Bobbi said. “Everything she wore, she pretty much made. […] That exposure was pretty cool because I was with my cousins, and we’d all have a good time and play with dolls.”
The exposure would also become a source of inspiration for Bobbi, who laughs when she talks about continuing to sew in her high school home economics class. “I wasn’t very good at the cooking part,” she said.
Bobbi’s mother gave her a Singer sewing machine for her high school graduation. But, just like for so many others, the machine languished while life, work, and raising a son took precedence. Born in Phoenix and raised in Window Rock, Arizona, Bobbi moved to Albuquerque in 2001 to finish her bachelor’s degree at the University of New Mexico.
Tragedy struck in 2009 when her 22-year-old son died. With her husband, Johnny von Hollen, working nights, Bobbi turned to her old Singer while she grieved. “I needed something to kind of preoccupy me and my time,” Bobbi said.
A tribute to Bobbi’s son and Johnny’s step-son, Bryant Kylor Tungovia, known as Kylor, displayed on a Memorial Wall. Featured are family photos of Bobbi’s father, her paternal grandfather, Bobbi and Kylor with their dog Shadow, and Bobbi’s maternal grandmothers, Edith Damon Yazzie and Elenor Wauneka. On Kylor’s guitar is fa photo of Bobbi’s uncle’s best friend, Joe Frederick, and the painting is a self-portrait of the dad of a former employer of Johnny’s. The shelf also holds Bobbi’s cedar, and the sage bundle.
Soon, that old Singer was giving Bobbi problems. Johnny suggested they visit their local Bernina dealer in Albuquerque. “That’s where the adventure began,” Bobbi said.
She also joined a local quilting group called the Late Sew where members would gather after hours to quilt, sometimes as late as midnight. Rebecca Welch, another Albuquerque quilter, ran the group at a now-closed shop and was also the woman who sold Bobbi her first Bernina. Rebecca is now one of Bobbi’s closest friends and has enjoyed watching her grow as a quilter. “She just kind of took off with it,” Rebecca said.
Details inside the studio, including Johnny’s JUKI straight stitch machine, adorned with stickers like the Phoenix Coyotes logo, a Gnar Lube (defunct) pink oil drop, and Johnny’s NY Deadhead identifier. He saw his first Grateful Dead show in September 1982 at Madison Square Garden.
“Took off” might be an understatement. Soon, Bobbi was certified at a local shop on a Gammill longarm and began wanting a longarm of her own. In 2012, while visiting her husband’s grandmother in Florida, the couple stopped in at a quilt shop—browsing is a favorite pastime while traveling—and walked out the new owners of a Baby Lock Crown Jewel II longarm.
Bobbi spent the next two days in intensive training while Johnny enjoyed the beach. Edge Water Quilting was born.
The company’s name honors Bobbi’s Native American heritage and is a spin on her origins within the Tábaahá, known as the Water Edge People, of the Diné, also commonly known as the Navajo tribe. Diné tradition holds that its people introduce themselves through their clanship as a way of identity and discovering family relationships. Each person comes from four clans, with the clan of their mother named first, followed by their father’s—using the phrase “born for”—with the clans of their maternal and paternal grandfathers named next. Bobbi is Tábaahá, born for Dzilghá’í, known as San Carlos Apache, and her maternal grandfather is Kiyaa’áanii, known as Towering House People, and her paternal grandfather is Taos Pueblo.
Edge Water’s name is also a nod to her husband’s upbringing near the water on Long Island, New York. Edge Water does custom and edge-to-edge longarm quilting, and Bobbi, a paralegal during the day, works at the business at nights and on weekends.
The first custom quilt that Bobbi longarmed was also the most nerve-wracking. Based on a Judy Niemeyer paper-pieced pattern, Cattails in the Meadow, the quilt was made by Bobbi’s friend, Carol Rising, of Corrales, New Mexico, to use as the backdrop for her wedding. If that’s not stressful enough, Bobbi had two weeks to devise the design and finish it.
Bobbi chose a design that incorporates feathers, pebbles, leaves, and straight lines around the inner border. She “double batted it, put it on the machine, and went to town over a weekend, got most of it done,” she said. “And, it’s beautiful.”
Bobbi at the Old Town Plaza in Albuquerque holding Cattails in the Meadow (2019), made by Carol Rising and custom quilted by Bobbi, using a pattern of the same name from Quiltworx.
Not only was the wedding a happy one, but her friend has continued to hand over her Judy Niemeyer quilts for finishing.
Given the complexity and physical toll of custom quilting, Bobbi takes only about four custom quilts each year. She often designs on her iPad, doodling and designing on the go, and she bounces ideas off Johnny, who eventually joined his wife on his own quilting journey.
Jan Lehmann-Shaw said she and Bobbi are on the same wavelength. The women met through the Albuquerque Modern Quilt Guild, and Bobbi has longarmed several of Jan’s quilts, including one she made during designer Alison Glass’ “Trinket” sew along in 2023. “When I took the top to her, I said, ‘I need something with baubles, you know?’” Jan said. “She knew exactly what I was talking about.”
The quilt, named Baubles, earned a Best Moveable Machine Quilting ribbon at the Albuquerque Fiber Arts Council’s 2024 Fiesta.
Bobbi holding Baubles (2024), pieced by Jan Lehmann Shaw and quilted by Bobbi.
But while Edge Water focuses on others’ quilts, Bobbi also enjoys making her own and has a goal to carve out more time for her personal work. Bobbi, who has incorporated elements of her Navajo culture into previous work, is on a journey to bring forth that heritage through her latest quilt, a challenge she’s been grappling with. Started during a workshop with quilt and fiber artist Victoria Findlay Wolfe, the top is a work-in-progress on Bobbi’s design wall. “We have so many stories, and we have landmarks that are sacred places to us,” she said. “I think that’s why I struggle because I want this to represent that.”
Bobbi has also been adding garment sewing to her repertoire, and she’s recently gotten into quilt repair. Much of that work has come from word-of-mouth through local quilt shops. “I hate to see a quilt not make it in the world,” Bobbi said, adding that it’s hard for her to turn a project down.
Quilting has also become a passion shared by husband and wife. While Bobbi visited a friend in Arizona in January 2017, Johnny helped himself to her sewing machine, Googling when he hit bumps in the road, including how to load a bobbin.
Bobbi and her husband, Johnny, work side by side in their shared studio.
When Bobbi returned, Johnny had finished his first quilt top, based on Victoria Findlay Wolfe’s improvisational scrap piecing method, described in 15 Minutes of Play. Bobbi was floored. “I came home, and he had a quilt top done,” she said. “I’m like, ‘Are you kidding me?’”
Johnny works as a technical training leader at General Mills and also has a background in carpentry. Quilting not only gives him something he can share with his wife, it also provides him an artistic outlet that’s not disruptive when his work hours conflict with Bobbi’s. It allows him to lean on his art history degree too, from the State University of New York at New Paltz.
Johnny’s work tends to be more improvisational. “I don’t sit down with a pattern. […] I just sort of pull out either a section of a panel, or I get a colorway that I got stuck in my head, and then, I just start throwing things on the design wall,” he said.
Every year, the couple takes the week off between Christmas and New Year’s and spends it hanging out in Bobbi’s quilting studio, enjoying charcuterie and cocktails. This year, Bobbi leaned on Johnny for a little inspiration, pulling together scraps from previous quilts to try her hand at improv.
Quilting, Bobbi said, calms and grounds her, especially from her busy workdays in the legal field, and it remains a connection to her grandmother. “It’s peaceful,” she said.
Courtney Mabeus-Brown has been a journalist for more than two decades and a quilter for about two years. She bought her first sewing machine during the COVID-19 pandemic, making bags and small home accessories before a friend got her hooked on quilting; she’s now made three quilts, and there is no end in sight. Courtney lives in Northern Virginia with her husband and cat in an old 1880s home. Her award-winning journalism has appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Virginian-Pilot, and many others, and her sewing work can be found on Instagram at @SundrySouthKing.
