Eva Saunders learned to sew, as many of us do, at her grandma’s knee in the 1990s. A professional seamstress, her grandmother, Theresia, would keep an eye on Eva during summer breaks in her sewing room. Eva, the designer behind Gingerly Quilt Co, sewed buttons on scraps and pieced squares of fabric together, and over the years, her grandma taught her to make clothes, increasing the challenges with every passing summer.
Eva spoke to Quiltfolk from her studio, while a curious kitty named Bobby tiptoed across her cutting table in the background. “I stopped sewing in middle school when it wasn’t cool to hang out with your grandma anymore,” she said with a wry smile. But she carried the skills she learned with her, altering her own clothes throughout college.
She began sewing in earnest again in the early stages of the COVID-19 pandemic, when mask-making was all the rage. The recipient of a donation of bed sheets, she used the fabric to make many masks, and then, in 2021, she decided to make a quilt with the scraps left over in remembrance.
“I made that one quilt, and I caught the bug,” she said. “I just kept going.” She found the process relaxing, and it helped her recall fond memories of sewing with her grandmother. She later learned that, around the same time (in the early 2020s), her grandmother, then in her 80s, was also sewing masks. Theresia passed away in October of 2023, having bequeathed Eva with sewing skills to last a lifetime. “I got a day to go look at her quilts and sewing room,” she said. “It didn’t feel like she was gone; it felt like she was still there. It was a big part of her life.”
Eva began to build her skills by making quilts from patterns, and then, one day, her husband saw her cutting fabric and mentioned the “pizza cutter” she was using. After she explained that it was a rotary cutter, he excitedly asked if she could please make a pizza quilt.
Inspired by Slice of Pi Quilts’ Exploding Heart quilt pattern (and with the designer’s blessing), Eva created the Exploding Pizza quilt, first for her husband—and then, as a pattern to sell in 2022. Now motivated to continue designing, Eva has since created different serialized patterns, with one motif having a pillow or bag to accompany the main quilt pattern.
Initially attracted to illustrative designs like the Exploding Pizza or her Dainty Paws pattern bundle, Eva wanted to experiment with more organic quilts because, as she put it, “I’m not a fan of squares.” She decided to use fine art as inspiration. A lover of Romanticist and Impressionist paintings, she began to play with the idea of more free-form quiltmaking. Wanting to combine her love of quilting with her favorite artists, she decided to look at Monet’s Water Lilies series, a set of approximately 250 oil paintings of artist Claude Monet’s garden at his home in Giverny, France. Monet’s flowers directly inspired Eva’s Zen Blossoms pattern, with pieced curved seams.
Wanting to move further toward improv, Eva turned to Vincent van Gogh’s 1889 oil painting The Starry Night next as inspiration. During the early stages of her exploration, Eva discovered that she could “paint” with narrow strips of fabric and set about recreating a treasured work of art. Her quilt painting is a stunning recreation of The Starry Night—each of van Gogh’s swirling dabs of paint meticulously interpreted with fabric and thread. The night sky overlooks the tiny village nestled next to mountains, watched over by a bright moon.
More recently, Eva has merged her design, film, writing, and teaching backgrounds to create a self-paced online course where students can quilt their own “painted” masterpieces. Quiltfolk was lucky enough to get a few tidbits of Eva’s advice for quilters:
Eva said of her work, “I want to empower quilters to make something unique to them.” Because sometimes quilting is more than just the quilt—it’s everything it depicts and also renders the artist’s thoughts, feelings, hopes, and dreams.
