Listen to Your Quilt

Barbara Persing was born in New Jersey, where her mother taught her and her four sisters how to sew. This was the beginning of Barbara's love for sewing, but she did not learn about quilting until eight years later, when she and her mother took a quilting class. Her first quilt of traditional blocks was made using cardboard templates. Over the past 35 years, she has grown as a quilt designer-her quilts today look nothing like those first quilts she made with her mother. Barbara now lives in Pennsylvania with her husband and two sons. She has always been a working mom but started working from home in 2000, when quilting went from being a hobby to a full-time job, and she started her own business as a longarm quilter. Her business quickly grew because her customers appreciated her unique ability to develop quilting designs to highlight the personality of their quilts. Her imagination for quilting designs grew as she worked for quilters with a wide variety of interests and styles. Barbara enjoys the challenge of providing her customers with creative machine quilting designs that are as distinctive as the unique style of each customer. Embracing this challenge became the beginning of her quilting approach - "I work for the quilt." The most important aspect of her job is to marry the quilting to the style of the quilt. She is thankful to her clients for giving her so much inspiration as a quilter. Barbara will tell you that each quilt she works on provides a new learning experience that enhances her abilities. She is amazed at what she can accomplish when pushed to work outside of her own comfort zone. In 2006, Barbara again started a new venture. In addition to her longarm quilting business, she started a pattern company, Fourth & Sixth Designs, with her sister Mary Hoover. Mary lives in New York and shares Barbara's love of quilting. Their patterns have been featured in Keepsake Quilting and many other national quilting magazines. Together, Barbara and Mary wrote StrataVarious Quilts, published by C&T, and enjoy teaching and lecturing. Despite a hectic schedule, Barbara continues to find time for her dedicated clients and enjoys every minute of collaboration with them. She still loves to spend all day running her longarm machine.