Maggie Vanderweit has been quilting for almost 40 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, Ontario, near Guelph, where she lives with her husband and two cats. Her married/personal name is Maggie Meredith.
Maggie is a Juried Art Member of SAQA, a professional member of CQA/ACC, and belongs to Connections, the CFUW Guelph Textile Art Group and SDA. 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 around the world and is in 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 new book “Stone Threads”, available June 2016, is a deeply personal and inspiring retrospective looking back on a lifetime of stitching.
Maggie sells her original textile art, cards, hand painted and dyed fabric from her studio, galleries, museums and various shows.
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 and 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: 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.