Red, White & Quilted

In the early 2000s, a man named Harry Bornstein stood in my quilt shop in Selfoss, Iceland, turning one of my table runner patterns over in his hands. Harry was the international sales manager for Checker Distributors, and his whole job was finding good ideas around the world and bringing them home to American quilters. Almost everything we used for quilting in Iceland back then was imported from America, so salesmen like him passed through now and again. He looked at my Braid Runner and said, “This is really good. You should put these in English. They would sell over there.”

I had plenty to do and did nothing about it at first. Harry was easy to like, easygoing and funny, the kind of man who made a friend out of every account, and he kept after me. Eventually I translated seven of my patterns into English, and he carried them off to International Quilt Market in Houston, the big wholesale show in the States.

A quilt shop in Selfoss

At the time I was running Bót.is, the first online quilt shop in Iceland. The same shop had a brick-and-mortar store on Eyravegur in Selfoss, the town where I grew up and where my own kids were growing up. We taught classes every week, ran sewing weekends, and mailed fabric to a club of a few hundred women around the country.

Then the response from America came back, and it was, to put it mildly, incredible. The orders were bigger than anything I had filled in Iceland. Three months later, in 2003, we moved the whole family to Minnesota: my husband, my three kids, and a business that suddenly had a market an ocean wide. America was not a stranger to me; I had spent a year in Florida as a teenager. One of those three kids was Atli. He was ten when we landed. He runs this company now, as our COO.

What red, white, and blue looks like in fabric

Red, white, and blue is a palette people tend to overthink. When I pull these colors, I am really after range: a few reds that are not all the same red, blues with some variety in tone, and something light, a soft white or a cream, to give the eye a place to rest. I like mixing prints from different fabric lines, because that is where the texture comes from. The fabric does the work when there is enough range in it.

It is the same instinct behind the Braid Runner that started all of this, a quilt-as-you-go pattern made to turn fabric you already have into something beautiful, quickly.

This week we pulled our reds, whites, and blues together for the Red, White & Quilted sale. It is a good week to fill in the reds, whites, and blues your collection is missing, or to start something for the Fourth.

Harry was right. Quilters in America did want my patterns, more than I ever imagined back in that little shop in Selfoss. He became a dear friend over the years, and we lost him in 2014. Most of what GE Designs is today traces back to an afternoon when he picked up a table runner and told me to translate it. Happy Fourth, from our family to yours.