Sidnee Snell – Meet the Artist

Textile artist Sidnee Snell is based in Portland Oregon and has been working in textiles since childhood, including a stint as a dressmaker in high school. In 1994, after a dozen or so years working as an electrical engineer and programmer, Sidnee Snell left the high-tech industry and began her professional artistic journey.

Sidnee Snell: https://www.sidneesnell.com/  \ https://www.instagram.com/sidneesnellstudio 

Her early art-quilts were geometrical and abstract in design. They were heavily influenced by traditional quilts and her studies with Nancy Crow and other prominent art quilters. In 2007, she began developing a foundation appliqué technique and producing quilts based on photographic imagery. 

Portland Airport
Portland Airport

“My quilts come together like a developing Polaroid. The construction technique I engineered uses raw-edged foundational appliqué to place the colours, quilting stitches to sketchily define the shapes, and a final washing to soften the borders between images. I like how the texture this produces blurs and abstracts my digitally manipulated photo-based images.  I want the viewer to want to touch the finished quilt, despite what all the signs in the exhibition warn. I want to entice the viewer to come closer.”

Rusty rivets quilt by Sidnee Snell
Rusty rivets quilt by Sidnee Snell

Sidnee’s work is in many public and private collections including Quilt National 2013.

“I want to know how everything is made, how everything works. Inspiration comes from anything my eye lands on, especially the push/pull of the human mark on nature and nature’s impact on the built world. I am more interested in the rusting rivet on a bridge than the river the bridge spans.”

Work by Sidnee Snell
Work by Sidnee Snell

“I was an engineer before I was an artist and now I am both. My studio practice is a union between the free-form exploration of “Why am I drawn to this image?” and “What happens if…?” and the linear thinking needed to answer the follow-up question, “How do I make this?” In my recent work, I am drawn to images that include human-made objects acted on by layers of time and natural forces. Each time a new obsession chooses me, I allow the answers to the what if question to open paths of visual- and self-exploration. I don’t want to be afraid; I want to be brave and courageous, so I work my way through my fears, trusting myself and all my years of being a maker to get me where the piece needs to go.”

Filmed at the Festival of Quilts 2024.

Further reading

If you’ve enjoyed watching this video, you might like the work of Janice Gunner featured in a video from the Festival of Quilts 2024.

Amy Pabst – Meet the Artist


Author and quilter Amy Pabst grew up in rural West Virginia, where there’s a strong heritage of quilting. Her exhibition ‘Micropiecing: Quarter Million’ presents a series of 27 miniature quilts that focuses on the traditional pineapple block on a very small scale.

Amy Pabst: https://www.instagram.com/amymakesquilt

Foundation pieced pineapple quilt by Amy Pabst - Meet the Artist
Foundation pieced pineapple quilt by Amy Pabst – Meet the Artist

All blocks are less than 2.5cm, and each piece is less than 3mm wide. Each quilt has thousands of pieces, and the series was considered complete when the total number of pieces reached 250,000. The design sources for Amy’s quilts include antique and contemporary quilts, as well as original designs. 

Variation on pineapple foundation patchwork
Variation on pineapple foundation patchwork

Amy Pabst

Amy is a West Virginia native, discovered quilting in 2011 after finding a book at her local library. Since then, she’s created countless quilts and become a prominent figure in the quilting community.  Amy is a teacher, speaker, and judge for the National Association of Certified Quilt Judges, and she actively participates in local and international guilds.  Her first book, Log Cabin: The 100,000 Pieces Project, was published in 2020 by Quiltmania.

Currently, Amy is a full-time fibers student at Marshall University, with minors in creative writing and women’s studies.

Christmas quilt by Amy Pabst
Christmas quilt by Amy Pabst

Filmed at the Festival of Quilts 2024.

For a more inspiration, please browse the ‘Meet the Artist’ collection on my YouTube Channel.

Further reading

If you’ve enjoyed watching this video, you might like the work of Lynne Edwards featured in a video from the Festival of Quilts 2023.

L’Merchie Frazier – Meet the Artist

L’Merchie Frazier is a multidisciplinary artist and educator who explores themes of Black identity in the Americas and beyond. Black and indigenous people have a shared history of over 500 years in unwritten, unrecognised and unacknowledged narratives about the spaces they occupy, physically, mentally and spiritually.  

Join L’Merchie as she shares the stories behind her work.

L’Merchie Frazier: https://lmerchiefrazier.org/

Story Quilt by L'Merchie Frazier
Story Quilt by L’Merchie Frazier

“The journey to establishing selfhood and importance that is manifest in today’s “call to action” is a trek of reclaiming the right to self-possession and ownership with elevated voice, story and space. Importantly, the direct action to embrace the right to exist, claim one’s own self-worth, beauty and love is a marked effort that fuels the move from insignificance to significance, to matter.”

This exhibition celebrates the Decade of African Descended People declared by the United Nations, 2015 to 2025. The LookBook quilts, The Quilted Chronicles series, participates in the restorative aesthetic to promote dialogue via an explorative historical lens, to reclaim the lives and legacies of Black and Brown people, children and their communities across centuries of memory, places and activism. 

Close up of a Story
Close up of a Story

L’Merchie’s quilts select moments to confront the impact of slavery and systemic racism.  

The inspiration to create these quilts is supported by archived threads of petitions, speeches, organisations, lawsuits, writings, media, witnessed violence and protests. The experience is documented from the kidnapping of Africans and their arrivals in 16th century, to the American Revolution, through the Civil War and the 13th Amendment in 1865, through the end of American Reconstruction, in a continuum to the 21st Century. 

Story Quilt by L'Merchie
Story Quilt by L’Merchie

Filmed at the Festival of Quilts 2023.

For a more inspiration, please browse the ‘Meet the Artist’ collection on my YouTube Channel.