Two rabbits have taken up residence in my backyard this summer. They spend most of their time under the blueberry bushes, patiently waiting for a greedy squirrel to land on a branch and shake a hailstorm of berries to the ground. When I wander out to the garden, the rabbits come to life, hopping across the grass to safety.
Seeing announcements for summer shop hops, I can’t help but think of those bunnies, though in my imagination, they’re dressed up like figures in a Beatrix Potter book and carrying baskets full of fat quarters. Hop, hop they go to their local quilt shops, one after another, from morning to late afternoon, always home in time for tea.
Perhaps if you live in a part of the country where quilt shops abound and the roads are good, this bunny hop mirrors your own shop hops (minus the rabbit ears). But if you live in Alaska? “Hop” might be a bit of a misnomer.
Just ask Marie Noah, owner of Northern Threads in Fairbanks, who ran the 2025 Alaska Shop Hop. She’s quick to point out that Alaska’s not one of those teeny-tiny states that make up The Lower 48. You could double Texas, plop it into the middle of Alaska, and you’d still have room to add a Rhode Island or two.
Which is to say, when you hop across Alaska, you definitely won’t be home in time for tea.
Fourteen shops across the state participated in this year’s hop. Each shop had its own block (each designed by Marie), and the 14 blocks stitched together form The Last Frontier quilt, a marvelous tableau of Alaska wildlife. Among the block designs were arctic foxes and polar bears, ground squirrels, hares, caribou and bald eagles, not to mention grizzly bears, puffins, musk ox, and orcas.
Let it be known that there’s more than one way to gather all this wildlife into one shopping basket. In fact, if you love the 2025 shop hop quilt (and it truly is gorgeous), you can buy the blocks from the comfort of your own home, or poolside, even, with a glass of iced tea in one hand and your iPhone in the other. (Click here to see Marie’s 2025 Shop Hop page.)
Ah, but wouldn’t it be lovely to head to Alaska and hop from shop to shop? You could start in Skagway and drive to Wasilla—a mere 14-hour trip! (Oh, but what a trip it would be!) Now, you could truly hop the 45 minutes from Wasilla to Anchorage, and then hop the 45 minutes to Palmer. See, this is easy! At least until you decide to head to Juneau (you’ll need to fly), or if you decide it’s time to head up to Fairbanks from Palmer (a five-hour trek).
Now, I’m not from Alaska, and I bet with a good navigator by your side (or on your phone), you could find a much more sensible route than the one I’ve just suggested. But you get my point: we’re not really hopping through Alaska, are we? We’re leaping and bounding.
According to Marie, a wide variety of quilters participated in the 2025 Shop Hop. “There are locals who are doing it for sure,” she told me when we spoke via Zoom. “There are certainly tourists who are trying to visit as many stores as they can. They’re super excited about being here. And then, there’s that group of people who can’t make it to all the stores, or they’re not coming to Alaska this season. So they’re mail ordering. We have some that get together as groups to save on shipping; they’ll order 10 for a group. So I think it’s a pretty even mix.”
At the time Quiltfolk spoke with Marie, 5,000 quilt kits had already been sold.
Marie was the 2025 Shop Hop’s mastermind. She designed the quilt, and then, she and her staff did all the cutting for the kits. As you might expect, it’s a lot of work. “I designed the pattern, wrote the pattern, printed the pattern, printed all the marketing materials for all the stores, and made the samples for all the stores,” Marie said. “I didn’t make a whole quilt for every store, just an individual block. And then, they put in their order, we shipped them the whole kit package together, and they sold it to the customer. So it’s a kind of marketing thing. It brings people to their store and makes the customers aware that they’re there. It helps those stores get recognized. And it helps the quilting community in general, in the state of Alaska.”
Fortunately, Marie enjoys the job, even if it is on the overwhelming side. She finds it rewarding and is excited that so many people love the Hop. And, of course, it brings quilters into her own shop, Northern Threads, a 4,700-square-foot retail space in Fairbanks that she’s owned and operated now for nearly 30 years. She credits the success of her shop to the fact that she creates unique products and experiences for her customers, including original designs and Alaska-themed quilt kits. She also had already created an online shop prior to the COVID-19 pandemic, so she was more prepared than most when the quilt world went online in 2020.
In spite of all the work it takes to run a shop and all the work it takes to run a shop hop, Marie is contemplating doing another hop next year. She’s already working on a pattern. “Am I going to get it done in time?” she mused. “I hope so. I hope so. I’m going to try my best to get it done because this has been fun.”
Frances O’Roark Dowell writes about quilts for magazines such as Quiltfolk, Quilting Arts, QuiltCon Magazine, and Fons & Porter’s Love of Quilting. She also writes quilt fiction (Birds in the Air, Margaret Goes Modern and Other Stories, and Friendship Album, 1933) and is the host of the Quilt Fiction Podcast. An award-winning children’s book author, Frances has published more than 25 books for kids, including the Edgar Award-winning Dovey Coe, The Secret Language of Girls trilogy, the Phineas MacGuire series, Shooting the Moon, and Hazard. For more about Frances, visit francesdowell.com.
Sign up for our newsletter to receive exclusive offers, news, and more!
