The Quilter on Fire Podcast

My guest today is Canadian Quilter Krista Russell! She trained as a teacher, and it shows in everything she does with quilting. She’s got the beginner in mind and designs patterns that tell a story, including a mystery quilt that comes with its own companion novel you can read at your own pace, and there’s a second one in the works. She’s also a long arm quilter who has taken her teaching beyond her own studio, running classes at the local library so more people in her community can learn to ...

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...