Elm Creek Quilts [09] Circle of Quilters (33 page)

Gretchen nodded, taking in the scene. “Congratulations,” she said, more impressed than she cared to admit. The former shoe
store had been decorated to resemble a country farmhouse, with bolts of brightly colored fabric arranged in antique armoires and pie cupboards. In the center of the room, an old kitchen table had been transformed into a cutting table. A partial wall that resembled the entrance to a one-room schoolhouse separated the back of the room from the main sales floor; through the doorway, Gretchen spied several rows of wooden desks and a blackboard hanging on the wall. Everywhere she looked, Gretchen found enticing displays of the latest fabrics, notions, patterns, and products to satisfy any quilter’s heart’s desire.

Heidi regarded her expectantly. “What do you think?”

“It’s wonderful,” said Gretchen. Even when she had envisioned her own quilt shop, she had not imagined anything so warm and enchanting. It was the kind of shop in which she could gladly spend an entire day and half a paycheck. “I’m sure it will be an enormous success.”

“I’m so glad you feel that way.” Heidi took her hand and led her to a small office tucked away in a back room, all but invisible from the shop floor. “I’m sure you noticed my classroom space. I would like you to be my first teacher.”

“I don’t know …”

“Not just a teacher. A partner.” Heidi indicated a sprawl of paperwork on the desk. “I haven’t forgotten your business plan. I know you have some capital. You asked me to invest in your shop, and now I’m asking you to invest in mine.”

Gretchen felt a small glimmering of hope. “I would be a partner?”

“A junior partner, but still, part owner. We would run this place together.” Heidi squared her shoulders as if to summon up an inner reservoir of resolve. “All right. You’re forcing me to do something I know I’m going to regret. You’re fired.”

“What?”

“You’re fired. As my cleaning lady. Now that you’re unemployed,
I’d like to rehire you as my quilting instructor and junior partner.” Heidi placed a sheaf of papers in Gretchen’s hands. “Here’s a contract. You’ll have two weeks of vacation each year and a health care plan. Including dental.”

Through Chad’s insurance company, no doubt, with a high deductible. But still … “Why?” she asked. Heidi knew many other perfectly capable quilting instructors. Was this her admission of guilt? Her apology? Nothing Heidi did could compensate for stealing Gretchen’s dream, intentional or not.

“I need you,” said Heidi in a small voice.

Gretchen was about to retort that nothing she had seen that day gave her that impression, but something in the younger woman’s expression stopped her short. It was the look of the little girl she had tutored, the one who wanted to dress like her and be a teacher like her, the little girl who had wanted so badly to be loved and admired.

“You don’t need me,” said Gretchen. Heidi didn’t, not really. “But … I think I would like to work here.”

Heidi beamed.

Over the years, as the junior partner of Quilts ’n Things, Gretchen was able to accomplish everything she had hoped to as owner of her own shop. She loved every part of her day, from opening the cozy shop in the morning to selecting stock, helping customers, making sample quilts to display on the walls above the fabric bolts, and teaching, especially when she introduced new quilters to the craft. She still cleaned up Heidi’s messes, but she would rather sweep up thread and put away fabric bolts than scrub bathrooms. She had come to appreciate Heidi’s creative imagination, which not only manifested itself in her quilt designs, but also in the way she ran the shop. She would hold spontaneous one-day sales that had the store packed with shoppers from the time they unlocked the
doors in the morning until long after their usual closing hour. She would throw parties based upon the silliest themes—“Three Months Until Christmas Day” or “Fabric Appreciation Week”—to the delight of their customers, who willingly seized upon any excuse to buy more fabric. She held an annual quilt show in the store where customers could vote for the Ugliest Quilt of All Time. Gretchen was appalled when Heidi first announced the contest, and she could not believe that anyone would humiliate herself by putting her name to any quilt entitled to that dubious honor. But ten brave souls entered that first year, and the winner was crowned while wearing a paper bag over her head. She had to be led by the hand to the front of the store to receive her prize, a basket of fat quarters and a gift certificate to one session of classes at the shop. Every year the contest grew, the entries becoming ever more abominable, until Heidi had to put her foot down and exclude any quilts that were deliberately made badly, so that only the truly and unintentionally awful would be considered for the grand prize.

Most winners used their gift certificates to enroll in a Quilting for Beginners course, and most made dramatic improvements. They all bought fabric, books, and notions at Quilts ’n Things, and many signed up for more advanced classes. Gretchen never would have thought to increase class enrollments by demonstrating to potential customers how sorely they needed the help.

“I wonder if this is how Ami Simms attracts new students,” Gretchen remarked once.

Heidi did not look up from the rack of quilt patterns she was arranging—not in alphabetical order as Gretchen would have done, but according to season. “Who?” she asked absently.

“Ami Simms. I said, I wonder if she uses her contest to get more students to enroll in classes, but I was only joking. She probably has so many students she has to turn some away.”

Heidi glanced over her shoulder at Gretchen, puzzled. “What contest?”

“The Worst Quilt in the World contest. She’s been running one for years. I assumed that’s where you got the idea.”

Heidi shook her head and shrugged, turning back to her work. “I’ve never heard of her, or her contest. Maybe she took the idea from us.”

“Never heard of Ami Simms?” repeated Gretchen, dubious.

“Of course you have. We carry her books. We met her at Paducah three years ago.”

Heidi made a helpless, apologetic gesture as she filed patterns.

Gretchen watched her in disbelief. Why on earth would Heidi pretend she had never heard of Ami Simms? Was she that unwilling to admit she had taken inspiration from Ami’s contest rather than invent it herself?

Gretchen already knew the answer to that one.

Although she and Heidi did not always agree, Gretchen liked to think they complemented each other: Heidi brought the imagination and spark to the business, while Gretchen understood how to turn her partner’s outlandish ideas into workable plans. Heidi was energetic and inventive; Gretchen, steady and practical. They were two halves of an excellent management team, and neither could have succeeded as well without the other. Gretchen often thought, however, that although they were both essential to the success of Quilts ’n Things, Heidi seemed to have most of the fun.

As the years passed, the quilt shop thrived, riding the surging wave of the quilting revival. Gretchen wasn’t sure whether Heidi was a trendsetter, putting forth styles and products she liked best and taking a chance that others would share her tastes, or if she was simply quick to perceive the sways and swells of popular opinion and could adapt quickly to match them. Either way, Quilts ’n Things earned a reputation for being the place to shop for everything new and innovative in the quilting world. Heidi advocated rotary cutter techniques and establishing a presence on the Internet when Gretchen was still worrying about how to best provide
templates for their block-of-the-month kits. Heidi invested in a longarm quilting machine and charged customers by the hour to use it at a time when Gretchen and her friends were still wrestling with the question of whether a machine-quilted top could be considered a true quilt. Before long, Gretchen began to notice a clear division within their clientele: the younger, newer quilters brought their questions to Heidi and ignored Gretchen, while the older, longtime quilters sought Gretchen’s advice and assumed Heidi was her less experienced assistant. Gretchen, to her secret shame, never clarified the reality of their arrangement.

Sometimes Heidi went too far. Gretchen was shocked and angered when she returned from her day off to discover that her partner had replaced all the shelves of her beloved floral calicos with brightly colored, exotic batiks. “Our customers will love these,” Heidi protested, bewildered by Gretchen’s reaction.

“Our customers love the calicos,” insisted Gretchen.

“They can still have them,” Heidi hastened to reassure her, and compromised by relocating the remaining bolts to the back shelves where they stored clearance merchandise. But hardly anyone bothered to look for them because they had usually reached their spending limits by the time they made it that far into the store. Taking inventory at the end of the month, Heidi remarked that only about five yards of the calicos had sold, and that she had been right to move them to make room for the highly popular batiks. When Gretchen pointed out that Heidi’s decision had become a self-fulfilling prophecy, Heidi merely shrugged. She did not need to perpetuate the argument; she had had her own way and she was selling fabric. For the sake of workplace harmony, Gretchen masked her annoyance and contented herself with making sure her fellow calico lovers knew exactly where to find the bolts and by placing baskets full of floral calico fat quarters at the checkout line to encourage impulse purchases.

Their educational philosophies differed even more than their
tastes in fabric. Gretchen instructed aspiring quilters as she had been taught, learning the fundamentals of quiltmaking while making simple blocks and moving on to more difficult patterns and new skills when the basics were mastered. Heidi believed that contemporary women did not have time to quilt as their grandmothers had. If they were going to spend an entire Saturday at a quilting workshop, they wanted to have a finished top at the end. Her classes emphasized rotary cutting, quick piecing, working with prepared patterns, and machine sewing every stitch. “Look at how many of my students finish their workshop quilts, bring them back to show us, and sign up for another class,” said Heidi when they were planning the next session of courses and were trying to efficiently divide up the classroom time.

“That’s true,” said Gretchen. It was easier to win over Heidi if she agreed with her first. “But at the end of the semester, my students can look at any quilt block, figure out how it’s constructed, design their own quilts, and draft their own patterns. Your students can make that one quilt. They make it quickly and well, but they can only make that one quilt. They might vary the colors or size, but it’s always the same.”

“That’s what they like,” countered Heidi. “They want certainty. They enjoy the feeling of accomplishment. They like having finished quilts to put on beds or give to grandchildren for Christmas. Their friends see the quilts and sign up for the next class. Maybe your students can decipher any pattern, but they also have closets stuffed full of UFOs.”

Gretchen knew her students did finish quilts—perhaps not as many as Heidi’s, but the quilts they did complete were unique, each one an original creative expression of its maker. The mass production of Heidi’s students could not compete. Of course, she would never say so aloud. Heidi’s students were lovely women and they enjoyed quilting as much as Gretchen’s favorite pupils did. But their sole focus on reproducing other quilters’ patterns
underscored another important difference between the two partners: Gretchen was most concerned with process, Heidi with product.

For many years, their partnership weathered minor disagreements and occasional full-blown arguments. They always reconciled, in part because Gretchen never failed to appease Heidi when she became tearful and melodramatic, but mostly because Quilts ’n Things was too important to them both to sacrifice its success to petty squabbling.

Just in time for its tenth anniversary, Quilts ’n Things was selected to appear in a special issue of
Contemporary Quiltmaker
magazine titled “The Best Quilt Shops of the Millennium.” Privately, Gretchen and Joe agreed that the title smacked of hyperbole and really ought to be amended to “The Best American Quilt Shops Currently in Operation That Carry Our Magazine,” but neither would have suggested they decline to participate. For all her self-deprecating jokes, Gretchen was honored to be included, and Heidi was thrilled with the prospect of so much free publicity.

The three days the team from the magazine spent in Sewickley was as close to stardom as Gretchen figured she was ever likely to get. Their stylist helped her select an outfit and did her hair and makeup for the photo shoot at the store. A reporter interviewed her at length, twice on her own and once more with Heidi and their two part-time employees. As he inquired about her vision for the shop, the inspiration for her quilts, and her history as a quilt-maker, Gretchen was struck by the realization that no one had ever asked her these questions before. She had quilted most of her life, and now, finally, someone cared enough to ask. Best of all, the reporter represented tens of thousands of readers who also cared.

A few months later, the magazine arrived from the printer’s and was arranged with much fanfare on the new book display at the front of the quilt shop. Gretchen knew that the reporter had interviewed
Heidi just as thoroughly as her, and yet she was stunned when she turned to the article and discovered a full-page photo of Heidi beaming out at her. A caption identified her as “Heidi Mueller, owner, creative inspiration, and driving force behind the finest quilt shop in western Pennsylvania.” Scattered among the photos of customers browsing through the shop were some of Heidi smiling over a cup of coffee in her kitchen, lecturing to an adoring class in the schoolhouse, wearing a look of thoughtful introspection as she arranged bolts of fabric—and one small group photo of Heidi standing with her arms folded in the foreground as Gretchen and the two other employees smiled admiringly at her from behind the checkout counter. Amid the paragraphs about how Heidi launched the shop and kept it running with the help of her “able assistants” was one quote from the lengthy interviews Gretchen had given the reporter. “Our customers tell us every day how much the shop reflects Heidi’s creativity,” Gretchen had told him. “She has a true gift for inspiring new quilters to take up the needle.”