Meeting Programs & Events

October 23, 2024, 7:00 pm

Linda Lambert

Lecture: Ink Collage Quilts and Fabric Tinting

Laura Heine Certified Instructor

Join Linda in this presentation to learn about Laura Heine’s process of collage quilting. While creating your design you will look at value, hues, and motifs to layer fabric while creating your collage quilt. Laura’s designs are fun to create and you will look at fabric in a whole new way. You may even need a different type of stash!

Quilting is so much more than a hobby. IT IS THERAPY! Learning a new technique not only exercises your brain, but lowers blood pressure, helps fight depression, and strengthens pathways in your brain. I look forward to sharing the research that supports your favorite hobby.

About Linda

Linda has been a teacher for 39 years; teaching at the grade school, high school, and college levels. She has been honored with several awards for her teaching and community service. Linda is an entrepreneur at heart having owned an embroidery business for 15 years, and currently as owner of Seamless Getaways quilting retreat in Forrest, IL.

She is a certified Laura Heine Collage Quilting instructor; teaching at many quilt shops throughout Illinois, while sharing her enthusiasm for collage quilting. 

November 23, 2024, 7:00 pm

Connie Martin

Lecture: PreCivil War Quilts Secret Codes to Freedom on the Underground Railroad

Join Connie as she tells the stories passed down to her great-grandmother Lizzie of how her family survived the antebellum period through trials and tribulations, and how they used quilts that contained hidden codes and secret message to assist abolitionists-white and black- to guide enslaved people to freedown through the Underground Railroad to Canada.

During this presentation, Connie shares eighteen different quilt patterns in replica quilts and refers to a book her mother, Dr. Clarice Boswell, wrote about their family called Lizzie’s Story: A Slave Family’s Journer to Freedom.

About Connie

Connie earned a B.A. from Illinois State University and an M.A. from Aurora University with a Thesis in Integrating African American History Lessons in educational curriculums.

A retired Language Arts teacher, M.O.V.E. international fitness convention co-owner, fitness convention Presenter, a 33-year Star fitness instructor, and mother of three sons; she finds joy in telling the secret codes and hidden messages in the family quilts her ancestors shared on the Underground Railroad.

Connie mesmerizingly holds her audience’s attention just as her mother did in presenting this family presentation for many years. She tells the history of the Underground Railroad, safe routes, and the stories of how the quilt codes, their meanings, and interpretations that have been passed down to her, a sixth-generation descendant of captured African slaves forced into slavery in America.