Maggie Vanderweit has been quilting since 1980 and sewing since childhood. She went to University in Toronto, Montreal and France and had a 20 year career as an ESL / FSL teacher in Northern Quebec and Ontario.
Maggie Vanderweit has been quilting since 1980 and sewing since childhood. She went to university in Toronto, France and Montreal and taught school in Northern Quebec and Ontario. She has given up a career as a French/ESL teacher to devote herself to the universe of the threaded needle and painted cloth. She feels privileged to be operating her business Stone Threads Fibre Art full-time from her walkout studio in Guelph, Ontario, where she lives with her husband. Her married/personal name is Maggie Meredith. She has recently retired from a 25 year career lecturing, giving trunk shows, selling her work and teaching all things art quilting.
Maggie is a Juried Art Member of SAQA, a professional member of CQA/ACC, and belongs to Connections Fibre Artists and the CFUW Guelph Textile Art Group. She has volunteered for SAQA as a Regional Rep, the chair of the 2020 moSAiQA Conference, and has sat on the board and the Development Committee since 2020.
Her work has been exhibited in galleries and museums around the world including Quilt National and IQA Houston and is in many international and national private collections. She has won numerous awards, including four first place prizes in the CQA National Juried Show for excellence in design, innovation, machine quilting and piecing. In 2016 Threadworks honoured her with the Grand Prize for "Storm Windows". Maggie is included in many publications and her exciting book "Stone Threads", available since June 2016, is a deeply personal and inspiring retrospective looking back on a lifetime of stitching. She has appeared as an instructor on Quilting Arts Television and her "Indigo Party" was the featured quilt celebrating IQA's 2019 Market in Houston.
Maggie is influenced and provoked to create by literature, good conversation, radio, colour, line, texture, her beliefs and private musings. She draws inspiration from the natural beauty of the farmlands, rolling hills, gardens and woods around her. She works with many different materials and techniques - from traditional pieced patchwork to intuitive abstract painting in depictions of political and personal events. She is probably best known for the hand-painted and dyed fabric she pieces in original and simple patterns, and then densely quilts in intricate, contemporary free-motion designs with her domestic sewing machine or her longarm. She also spends her days doing spontaneous handwork: embroidering, wet felting, embellishing, eco-dyeing and painting. She often works in a series, but every piece emerges completely unique. Her desire is to create spiritually meaningful textile art, and she believes that every creative act requires faith and optimism.