Both! Allie Aller’s passion for quilting drives her to spend four to five hours every day in her studio, and the crazy quilt technique is one of her favorites. The only thing that rivals her love of quilting is her flower garden. Her garden is an integral part of her life. “I don’t know if the garden influences my quilting or my quilting influences the garden,” Allie said. “They are that connected.”
“There were no needlewomen in my immediate family,” Allie confessed. However, the stitching bug hit her hard when an older cousin, who used appliqué as her medium for illustrations in the 1960 and 70s, opened her fabric stash and said, “take what you want.” Allie was completely intrigued. “That one act of generosity changed my life,” Allie said.
Allie’s quilting has traversed several phases, each of which she passionately pursues until she feels that the genre has run its course; then, she changes to another technique. Like many of us, she started with traditional quilting then became interested in raw edge landscape collage quilting. Next, she explored broderie perse. Allie recalled, “Cutting out floral fabrics got me through little league games.” Next, while visiting a church with her brother, she noticed the beautiful stained-glass windows depicting landscape scenes. Gold leaf covered the lead, and she immediately set out to replicate those windows in fabric and even authored a book on her stained-glass technique.
“Then crazy quilting hit me like a Mack truck,” Allie remembered. She was given four industrial sized trash bags full of slightly smokey smelling fabric samples after a fire in a local decorator’s shop. The bags included beautiful textiles that she hadn’t yet used in quilts like dupioni silk, velvet, jacquard, and Belgium linen. That same week, she attended her first beading conference. The beads plus the fabric samples were almost too much for her. “I always had a problem following a pattern, and crazy quilting is all about improvisational decisions. Everything was a new design decision. I immediately took to it. It was so much fun. I was delirious with joy,” Allie recalled.
She continued down her crazy quilting path for 14 years, often spending up to one year on a quilt. Allie joked, “I’m a monogamous quilter. I’m true to one project at a time.” She described her quilt Crazy for Flowers as the “high water mark of my crazy quilt genre.”
But she discovered that the naked blocks of the crazy quilt top were often finished in a couple of weeks, and she spent the rest of the time on embellishments. She missed playing with fabric. So during COVID-19, she completed 23 quilt rescues — repairing and salvaging old quilts that satisfied her need to touch fabric and deeply connect with her quilting heritage.
Allie has won multiple awards, but one of the best was winning the grand prize in a 2012 Dollfus-Mieg et Compagnie (DMC) thread essay contest. The prize included a week in Paris, a trip to the DMC factory and archives, and thread in every color they made. Her studio includes this “wall of thread.”
She has plenty of plans, including a solo exhibit at the Texas Quilt Museum in the fall of 2024. Her newest direction consists of using international textiles from different times in history and combining them harmoniously in a very personal way to reflect her desire for world peace. Another future project may be a children’s book illustrated in fabric.
Allie has lived in Washougal, Washington for 33 years, and says the rain doesn’t bother her nor does the cloudy weather. “The sky is always moving, and that makes me happy,” Allie said. This weather is also conducive to her thriving flower garden. Her husband, Robert, is a master gardener and plants the vegetable garden, which he maintains in a very measured and precise manner, while her flowers are wild and flowing — very much like her crazy quilts.
Diane L. Murtha is an award-winning quilter, fiber artist, author, and international lecturer and instructor. Quilting for over 30 years, she gravitated to art quilts and discovered she loves challenges. Her quilts and articles are included in books, 30 + magazines, and multiple juried exhibits and international shows. Diane published her first book, Artful Insights in Fiber: Quilted Bits of Wit & Wisdom in March 2023. She currently resides in Iowa. Learn more at www.dianeLmurtha.com, or follow her on Instagram @dianelmurtha.
