Who is Marsha McCloskey?

Marsha McCloskey is well known throughout the quilting world. A graphic arts major in college, she turned from printmaking to quiltmaking in 1969 as motherhood made the messier media impractical. Marsha sold her earliest quilting efforts at the weekly Saturday Market in Eugene, Oregon. She found that the more quilts, potholders and baby blocks she sold, the more she had to make to replace them. She developed her skills as a seamstress and fabric artist through such daily practice. She made patchwork gift items for craft fairs and gift shops in the Northwest and California for many years. In 1975 Marsha began to teach quiltmaking at her local quilt store. Since then she has taught classes and workshops for groups in the Seattle area where she lived for many years, as well as for conferences and quilt guilds in 40 different states (so far!) throughout the USA. In 1990 she taught her first international workshop in Australia. Since then she has been invited to teach in New Zealand, Holland, Belgium, France, Canada, Japan, England, Norway and Denmark.

Marsha specializes in Feathered Star designs. Her quilts have a traditional look, yet are an inspiration to quilters of every sort. Her exceptional sense of color encourages others to branch out into new color schemes and fabric uses. Marsha's designs for multi-fabric, rotary-cut and machine-pieced quilts can all be made by the average quilter.

Her first book, Small Quilts was published in 1981 and is the book that countless quilters used to make their very first quilts. Since then she has written or co-authored twenty-nine books on quiltmaking. Today, Marsha continues to make and design quilts, write quilt books, travel and teach. Her recent books include, Blended Quilts, written with co-author Sharon Yenter(2002) , Feathered Star Quilt Blocks I(2003), and Blended Quilts II (2004) and Feathered Star Quilt Blocks II (2010).

Marsha has her own small publishing company called Feathered Star Productions, Inc., and is the designer of quilting fabrics under the Clothworks label and In the Beginning Fabrics.

Steve and I share our home with a golden retriever named Scooter, who likes to hide behind the toilet, adores chasing balls, and sleeps with all four paws straight up in the air.