At Stitches Quilt Shop, quilters can find 3,000 bolts of fabric. To a non-quilter, that sounds like a ridiculous amount. Owner Becky Terrell assures us it is not.
Terrell is the third owner of the Glendale shop, which has been supplying area quilters with the tools of their trade for 25 years. When she moved to her current home—which is across the street, in eyesight of the store—she quickly became a Stitches regular. Eventually, she started thinking about what it’d be like to own the shop one day.
“I watched my father during his retirement, and he did not retire well,” Terrell says, laughing. “He quit his full-time day job and started doing what he wanted to do. Otherwise, he would have driven my mother crazy.”
Photo by Devyn Glista
Terrell spent 20 years at Procter & Gamble followed by eight years of consulting work. Eventually, tired of the travel, she decided to turn to a job that was more hobby than work. She told the shop’s previous owners that if they ever considered selling, she was interested in buying Stitches. And in 2014, they handed her the keys.
Under Terrell’s ownership, the shop’s wares have gotten a little brighter, a little more modern. Her best-selling fabric is by Kaffe Fassett, a fiber artist in his early 80s whose bold, colorful designs border on trippy. Take the four peony options available at Stitches in early February: Huge, realistic bloom illustrations seem to float on a duotone-esque background in shades of lilac, turquoise, coral, and forest green.
The Charley Harper fabric is a huge hit, too. Harper’s son licenses the designs to a fabric printer. The mate-rial is all organic, finely milled, and, Terrell says, “some of the nicest feeling fabric we have in the shop.”
Photo by Devyn Glista
While the shop’s customers are largely women in their 50s and up, Terrell says there is a growing contingent of younger quilters in their 30s and 40s. During the pandemic, Stitches saw an increased interest in quilting as people turned to creative hobbies as an alternative to TV-binging. This was evidenced, Terrell says, by how many people have needed to replace their sewing machines recently. And like nearly every other industry these days, there have been supply chain issues.
“It was an interesting challenge,” she says. “We’ve never had that challenge, where the world is short of sewing machines.”
Stitches Quilt Shop, 16 Village Square, Glendale, (513) 733-3999
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