Anna Maria Horner
Anna Maria Horner is a superstar in the modern quilting world. Her 12South sewing shop Craft South is a wonderland of neatly arranged bolts of fabric, yarn, patterns, sewing machines, embroidery supplies and hand-crafted goods. The shop offers a rotating selection of classes and workshops featuring local sewists and out-of-town guests.
Horner’s repertoire includes clothing — she started her sewing career by designing and sewing garments — embroidery, patterns and collections of fabric that feature bold colors and designs that tell stories. Her background is in fine art — she has a degree in drawing from the University of Tennessee. At QuiltCon, Craft South will have a vending booth with fabric and supplies, and the shop will be the official Janome sewing machine vendor. (Pro tip: QuiltCon is a great time to get a machine, because discounts are offered during the convention.) Craft South will host two live recordings of the Modern Sewciety podcast with quilters who are coming to town. Tickets sold out fast, but both episodes will be available at modernsewciety.com. We spoke with Horner ahead of QuiltCon about how modern quilting is built on strong traditions.
I’m interested in the relationship between modern quilters and the history of quilting. Where do you think you fall on this spectrum?
As someone who has a fine arts degree, I think of traditional quilting as how things have been done versus modern quilting, which I think of as how people are presenting quilts now. They intersect in really beautiful places. … I want to make something I haven’t seen before, but I love looking at how things have always been made, in terms of how to traditionally make flying geese or a log cabin or whatever it is. That’s the real beauty. Quilting to me is all the different methods that have been developed to create any one block or technique.
Can you talk about a collection of fabrics or even a quilt itself telling a story?
A sampler-style quilt is very traditional in that there were a couple of reasons why women made samplers. One was to show off all the blocks they knew how to make. So samplers tend to be like a collage of different block styles all put together. ... Often they tell the story of a city. ... Every block was made by someone different in the community. … Often young women in early America would make a sampler and have the help of women in her community so that before she got married and moved out to California to the Gold Rush, or before she moved to another part of the country where she was without her elders, she would have a reference of how to make every single block.
How does that relate to your own practice?
In my very tiny little history of making quilts … I have a tendency to be able to look at a work, and it triggers whatever was on my mind as I was making it. It’s that sort of connection with passing time and what’s happening in your life as you’re making something that I find really compelling and kind of personally gratifying, that it’s a record of those months. Whether it was good thoughts or bad thoughts or worried thoughts or difficulties — I find making very cathartic, and then you sort of have this beautiful thing that’s represented that part of your life.
Do you enjoy teaching?
I absolutely love it. The past couple years I’ve been doing quite a bit more traveling [to teach]. It’s a really lovely opportunity to be able to help grow the fabric brand as well, because I have distributors in different parts of the world. Often I get to travel to that part of the world and be hosted by other shops. … The quilting and craft community is one where you can make a difference in a grassroots kind of way, where lecturing 75 people, lecturing 100 people, lecturing 50 people at a guild or a shop and teaching them, spending the weekend with them — it roots you in part of their system of making and inspiration. It’s a huge honor.
