Room for Everyone: Thoughts Before QuiltCon 2026

I’ll be at QuiltCon in Raleigh this week (February 19-22), giving a lecture called “Rewiring Tradition: How AI is Transforming Creative Endeavors.” The session description talks about biases, blind spots, and using AI to enhance originality rather than diminish it. That’s all true.

But what I’m really looking forward to is walking through the show.

QuiltCon is exclusively modern quilting—and that focus makes sense. The Modern Quilt Guild built something vital: a community with clear aesthetic values, shared language, and room for experimentation. Modern quilting gave permission to a lot of makers who felt like they didn’t fit the traditional guild model. That matters.

But even within modern quilting, people wander. A modern quilter drafts a Mariner’s Compass because they’re curious about the geometry. Someone tries English Paper Piecing for the first time because they want something portable. A longarm quilter experiments with ruler work one day and free motion the next. We move between methods, aesthetics, and tools—not because we’re indecisive, but because making things is about curiosity, not purity.

There's Room for All of It

What I love about events like QuiltCon is that they make visible something the internet often obscures: we’re not in competition. The person drafting by hand on graph paper and the person using EQ8 are both designing quilts. The appliqué artist and the foundation piecer are solving different creative problems with different tools. The quilter who uses AI to generate color palettes and the one who pulls fabrics by intuition are both making choices.

The tool doesn’t define the work. The person using it does.

I use AI in my creative process—sometimes to test layouts, sometimes to explore pattern variations I wouldn’t have time to draft manually, sometimes just to see what happens when I push an idea in an unexpected direction. It’s part of my workflow the same way Adobe Illustrator or PreQuilt might be for someone else. But it’s not the point. The point is the quilt I make, the judgment I bring to it, and whether it does what I intended.

Why I'm Grateful for This Invitation

I’m grateful to the QuiltCon organizers for making space for this conversation. Not because AI needs defending—it doesn’t. But because the quilting community deserves clear, grounded information about what these AI tools actually do, where they fall short, and how to use them without handing over creative control.

That’s what this lecture is about: giving people the knowledge they need to decide for themselves. Not everyone will want to use AI, and that’s fine. But dismissing it without understanding it—or adopting it without questioning it—both lead to the same problem: loss of agency.

The people who draft on graph paper, the ones who love the precision of Foundation Paper Piecing, the quilters who work entirely in Illustrator, and the makers experimenting with AI—we’re all solving creative problems. We’re all trying to translate an idea into fabric. We’re all part of the same lineage of people who figured out how to turn scraps into something coherent, beautiful, or useful.

What I Hope Happens

I hope people leave my session with a clearer sense of how AI image models work, what their limitations are, and where creative judgment still matters. I hope they ask hard questions. I hope some of them try it, and I hope others walk away more confident in their decision not to.

But more than that, I hope QuiltCon reminds all of us—modern quilters, traditional quilters, art quilters, utility quilters, hand quilters, longarm quilters—that there’s room for everyone. Room for every process. Room for skepticism and curiosity. Room for slow hand work and fast digital iteration.

The craft is big enough for all of it.

I’ll see you in Raleigh.