Stephanie Moss bloomed in Texas.
Not only is that the name of one of her quilts, which won a third place ribbon at the 2024 Tri-County Quilt Guild’s show, it’s also a sentiment she feels about her adopted home state. “It’s a place where I’ve really grown, and I was able to bloom and really become myself,” she said.
Born and raised in Kalamazoo, Michigan, where she also attended Western Michigan University, Stephanie moved to Texas in 1986. She was ready to leave her hometown and loved the warm Texas climate. “They were really recruiting teachers, and I was an educator,” she said.
Stephanie sewed clothes for her dolls as a little girl, and she was also exposed to quilting by multiple women in her family. Her paternal grandmother, Alvaine Moss, was a quilter, and her aunt, Emma Harris, was a tailor who later took up the craft. A creative and curious child, Stephanie was intrigued by the quilts made by these women, which often incorporated scraps of old clothing. “I wondered, ‘How did they put this together?’ I always, just in the back of my mind, wanted to learn how to make a quilt,” she said.
Like many quilters, Stephanie started along a traditional path, doing patchwork and incorporating Flying Geese and Half Square Triangles into her work, but in 2006, a breast cancer diagnosis slowed her journey. By 2012, she was in long-term remission—she remains healthy today—but was out of work because of a layoff. Realizing Stephanie might be looking for a distraction during a stressful time, Jeri Cook asked for her help with a project to make quilts for Houston’s Bread of Life, a nonprofit that aids the city’s underserved communities.
What Stephanie didn’t realize was the scope of the project: 100 quilts within a year’s time, a number that seemed implausible then. “That’s still something we laugh about,” Stephanie said. “But doing those 12 quilts during that year, that’s when I realized, ‘Hey, I’m kind of good at this.’ I really enjoyed it.”
Stephanie was hooked. As her journey deepened, her quilting improved, and she began to explore more, expanding into appliqué and art quilting. She calls her style a mixture of traditional, modern, and African American, and much of her work incorporates her love of bold colors, including African wax print fabrics.
She finds inspiration all around her: in learning new techniques, in art, even in the scraps of fabric or craft supplies, like buttons, people give her once they learn about her love for quilting. “The ideas never stop coming, though. They never stop. There’s always something to be working on,” Stephanie said.
A member of the Tri-County Quilt Guild since 2014, she was starting on a quilt for their 2024 show when a friend sent Stephanie a photo of herself at age 18. Stephanie stands “like a deer in the headlights,” having just won a college scholarship. “I looked at that little girl, and I was like, ‘Is that me?’ I couldn’t even believe it because I just looked so frail and so afraid of everything,” Stephanie said. “Texas has been a good place.”
That photo, along with fabric scraps with bluebonnets—The Lone Star State’s official flower—inspired her quilt I Bloomed in Texas (2024). Made for the show’s challenge category, “Texas in Bloom,” the brightly colored quilt is a Texas twist on the Life in Full Bloom pattern by Nancy Halvorsen of Art to Heart.
The guild’s 2024 show was particularly special for Stephanie. I Bloomed in Texas received a third place ribbon—her third quilt to place so high in a guild show. (The quilt also won a white ribbon at the Houston Livestock Show and Rodeo in 2025.) She worked as co-chair for the guild show, too, which took two years of planning and featured more than 200 quilts, bringing in as many as 1,300 visitors over two days. “I have never seen such generosity amongst a group of people as I saw in those two years,” Stephanie said.
Shari Stone was also a co-chair for the 2024 show. Stephanie’s excitement over winning another ribbon “was just contagious,” she said, adding that her enthusiasm inspires other guild members to get over their intimidation of entering their quilts into shows.
As schoolhouse committee chair for the guild’s 2026 show, held at the end of February, Stephanie helped lead and organize educational activities for the event, including planning lectures and organizing presentations. (Stephanie presented on using African wax prints.) Being involved behind the scenes, including as a scribe for the West Houston Quilter’s Guild show in 2025, has given her additional insight into how to improve her work. For years, she said, her binding was never quite right. Finally, she set off to fix it. During the 2024 show, “They actually made a really positive comment about my bindings,” Stephanie said.
In addition to being a member of the Tri-County Quilt Guild, Stephanie is a member of the National African American Quilt Guild. During a challenge with that guild, she made a portrait quilt called The Matriarch (2025), based on a painting by Houston artist Rita Barnes. It was included in an exhibit at the Houston Museum of African American Culture in 2025. The exhibit moved to the Texas Quilt Museum and will be displayed through April 2026.
Stephanie has also been a speaker for Quilt Africa Fabrics’ International Summit, and she has volunteered with Houston-based nonprofit Angel Babies Matter Network, making mini quilts for families dealing with pregnancy loss. With her help, including enlisting the National African American Quilt Guild and the Dallas-based Quilting Sisters of Color, more than 600 mini quilts have been donated.
Her faith plays a huge role in her life as well. She oversees a community life group at Houston’s First Metropolitan Church, and along with exploring more portrait, appliqué, and collage quilting, she plans to continue expressing her spirituality through her work. Stephanie hopes to put together a trunk show of her quilts that she can take to churches throughout the Houston region. Such a show will probably include Dance Like David (2024), a quilt she made depicting a woman joyously dancing in church while playing a tambourine—based on the biblical account in which King David danced with abandon as he carried the Ark of the Covenant into Jerusalem.
That quilt, another challenge with the National African American Quilt Guild, was exhibited in 2025 at the Black Heritage Gallery in Lake Charles, Louisiana’s Historic City Hall Arts and Cultural Center. Dance Like David also received an honorable mention ribbon during the Tri-County Quilt Guild’s 2026 show. Two others, King’s Holiday and It Takes a Village, received 2nd and 3rd place ribbons at the show, respectively.
Stephanie said she feels compelled to create, adding her belief that “my quilting is a gift from above.” When she’s not quilting, she is likely to be found making bags, rope bowls, table runners, or any number of sewn goods—she calls the items “Steffie Stuff”—for that jolt of satisfaction that comes with a quick project. “Quilting and creating bring me so much joy, and that wonderful feeling pushes me from one project to the next project and on to the next one,” Stephanie 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.
