The Quilter on Fire Podcast

My guest Shirley Hauck built her creative roots in a quilting guild, surrounded by friends who encouraged her love of colour, texture, and what she calls "creative freestyle art." Back in 2015, she watched an artist win a design competition who added fabric to her paintings, and the idea stuck with her. She didn't try it herself until a few years later. Now she's known for her prairie landscape paintings of old barns and abandoned homesteads tied to her own family history. She works in a mix ...

My guest today is Author Barbara Emodi. She has spent decades teaching people to sew — she's written sewing books, edited for major sewing magazines, and built a career teaching people to sew garments. She's a Canadian author of the Gasper's Cove Cozy Mystery series, set in a small coastal town in Nova Scotia — not a real place, but close enough that you want to hop on a plane and go find it. And I wish you could meet the characters in real life too. She's still crafting a career of sewing an...

Matt Wilding has been taking the quilting scene by storm — by 3D storm, I should say. He's won back-to-back top prizes in the Quilt Creations category at Festival of Quilts, Birmingham - first for "Wear Your Wings With Pride" in 2025, then for his quilted sphere, "Pride Around The World," in 2026. Have you seen this giant quilted ball on Instagram? It’s an exemplary lesson in design just to witness. I was so pleased to be able to see this 3D giant quilted sphere in person this summer in Birmi...

Eli McCann is a lawyer, writer, and podcaster based in Salt Lake City. He writes a monthly humor column for the Salt Lake Tribune, and has cohosted the Strangerville podcast and live show since 2016. His writing has run in the Washington Post, Newsweek, HuffPost, and the BBC. Now he's published his first novel, Stitched, and the story unfolds around a small Utah quilting guild. Eli grew up under a quilters frame but he’s never made a quilt. So his mom's real quilting group gave him the detail...

Today I'm sitting down with a quilter whose journey has taken her from traditional patterns learned decades ago, to a bold, modern design practice worked out of a tiny studio outside London that's floor to ceiling in fabric. We're talking old meeting new — traditional patterns reimagined modern through her own lens, mostly in linen for that timeless texture, and a slow practice of hand quilting that is Sarah's favourite part of the entire process. Her quilts have been in major shows like Quil...