Judy Martin

Judy Martin, a quilt designer, author, and publisher from Grinnell, Iowa, was inducted into The Quilters Hall of Fame in recognition of a four-decade career that has shaped how quilters design and build their own patterns.

Martin's introduction to quiltmaking came early. At age nine, she pieced a doll quilt from fabric scraps. She sewed clothing throughout her school years, and used her first paycheck to buy a used Singer Featherweight sewing machine before heading to college. Once there, changing fashions pulled her away from sewing — until a box of leftover fabric scraps found during a Thanksgiving break of her sophomore year drew her back. Working with dressmaking tools rather than quilting templates, she cut squares and rectangles of red, white, and blue fabric and pieced them into an original design. Finishing that quilt gave her a sense of accomplishment unlike anything she'd felt making clothes, and she was hooked.

A gift from her sister — Ruby Short McKim's 101 Patchwork Patterns — opened her eyes to the scope of traditional quiltmaking, but also left her wondering whether there was anything left to design. Working through traditional blocks, she found her answer: by combining and adapting elements of existing patterns, she could create something genuinely new. That realization set the direction for the rest of her career.

Following the career-assessment advice in What Color Is Your Parachute, Martin approached Quilter's Newsletter Magazine and was hired as assistant editor. The job put her to work writing articles, calculating fabric yardage, and, before long, designing quilts and drafting patterns of her own — a hands-on education in the craft and business of quiltmaking that would shape everything she did afterward.

After eight years in magazine publishing, Martin and her husband, Steve, made a bold decision to strike out on their own. The timing was right: the sale of Steve's family furniture business provided startup capital, and the couple was ready to start a family. Martin wanted to design and quilt again, something the pace of magazine work had left little room for, and working from home offered a way to do that while raising children. Steve, an English major and salesman, brought skills that complemented her own. They named the new venture Crosley-Griffith Publishing — a deliberately non-quilting name, kept open in case either of them ever wanted to write a novel.

Self-publishing meant taking on the financial risk of printing their own books, but also keeping all the proceeds. With an infant and a toddler at home, the couple built an office and sewing room above their detached garage and traded childcare shifts with a part-time nanny. Martin has said that being their own bosses let one of them always be available for the children, and that working side by side made her and Steve appreciate each other all the more. That garage office remains her workspace today.

Over her career, Martin has written 28 books: five for Leman Publications, one for Charles Scribner's Sons, twenty-one self-published through Crosley-Griffith, and a final title released by C&T Publishing in 2022. Among them, she counts Singular Stars as a particular point of pride. In it, she reworked the traditional eight-diamond Lone Star into numerous variations built from 32 diamond-shaped blocks, using three or four asymmetrical block types that quilters could rotate and arrange in different ways. She has described the project as an extension of the playful, rearrangeable design spirit she has always loved in Log Cabin quilts, applied for the first time to stars.

Martin's influence reaches beyond her own patterns. Generations of quilters have learned to design their own quilts using methods she developed and taught through her books and magazine work, extending her impact well past the projects she designed herself.

Martin continues to take on ambitious new work, including curating solo exhibitions of her quilts for museum and show audiences. She has also said she hopes to turn some of her attention from designing patterns for others to make toward creating one-of-a-kind masterpiece quilts of her own.

Of her induction into The Quilters Hall of Fame, Martin has said it stands as "an affirmation of my life's work," placing her among quiltmakers whose work has shaped the direction of quilt culture — the same kind of impact she hopes her own designs will continue to have for quilters who come after her.

By Deb Geyer