Maggie Vanderweit has been quilting for over 30 years 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. She feels privileged to be operating her business Stone Threads Fibre Art full-time from her walkout studio in Fergus, near Guelph, where she lives with her husband, two sons and three cats. Her married/personal name is Maggie Meredith.
Maggie is a member of the CQA, ONN, CFUW Guelph Textile Art Group, the Harris Collective at the Elora Centre for the Arts, the Whitestone Gallery and Connections. She offers inspirational lectures, trunk shows and classes to guilds, schools, colleges, art classes, retreats, quilt shops, private groups and international needlework shows and quilting conferences.
Her work has been exhibited in galleries and museums across Canada and is in private collections around the world. She has won numerous awards, including two first place prizes in the CQA National Juried Quilt Show, one for her machine quilting for “Stone Weather”, and one for her piecing in “Fire in the Cabin - PMS and the Full Moon”. Maggie sells her original textile art from her studio, galleries, museums, during the Elora-Fergus Studio Tour, Fair November and the One of a Kind Show. She also sells her own photo greeting cards, hand-painted fabrics and threads and creates commissioned pieces for public and personal spaces.
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 and woods around her. She works with many different materials and techniques - from traditional pieced patchwork to intuitive abstract painting and depictions of political and personal events. She is probably best known for the hand-painted fabric she pieces in original and simple patterns, and then densely quilts in intricate, contemporary free-motion designs with her domestic sewing machine. She also spends her days doing spontaneous handwork: beading, embroidering, wet felting, embellishing, eco-dyeing, faux encaustic 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.
