About Us

Our business is helping quilt shop owners and other quilt professionals use the Web to advance your business. As advice columnists for Quilting Professional and Sewing, Quilting, & Embroidery Professional magazines, we help thousands of quilt business owners, like yourself, with their web sites by sharing our knowledge. We understand the needs of the quilt business owner for a high quality, professional-looking, but low cost website. We also know that you need a site that will attract the quilters who are your customers.

Finding a web designer you can trust and who understands the realities of operating a quilt business is not always easy. Paula Mariedaughter, our web designer, understands quilt businesses. She is an award winning quilter who has operated a quilt teaching business since 1995. She brings her extensive knowledge of color and design to the websites she designs and is probably the only web designer on the Internet who will use quilting design principles in designing a website for you. Please take a look at the site that Paula designed for Helen Squire (www.helensquire.com) to see the kind of work that Paula can do for you. Please also see her quilt, Crossroads 1879 to 2003, pictured at right which was featured in the Quilt Art 2005 Engagement Calendar from AQS.

Jeanne Neath, our computer programmer, brings over 25 years of programming experience to your website. Jeanne has developed a high performance, low cost shopping cart especially for quilt shops and other quilt businesses who have products to sell. The cart provides far more options for fabric display than other carts, allowing you to display a single fabric in many different categories. The cart comes with a fabric calculator for use by your customers. This shopping cart costs much less to operate than most shopping carts available on the Web, allowing online shop owners to save thousands of dollars over years of use.

We understand that most quilt business owners do not want to be computer experts. We provide expert and friendly customer support for all of our products, by phone and by email. We take real pleasure in helping you make your website a success.

We work with quilt business owners all over the U.S., from New York City to, of course, Paducah Kentucky - and wherever you are. Distance is never an obstacle in designing for the World Wide Web. We always work closely with our customers, showing you the web pages as we develop them and changing the design based on your feedback. 

The basic design principles of color, shape, line, and value remain central to a good design. Listening to the client and translating their desired look for the site is always our goal. Studying successful designs, i.e. sites that communicate clearly and load quickly, and applying the design principles are central to creating a professional looking website. Designing a quilt and designing a website require the same attention to detail and a sustained commitment to the project at hand. 

I see myself as a lifelong collage artist. although I have no formal art training. I graduated with a degree in political science in 1967 from Maryville College, a small liberal arts college in Tennessee. For 16 years I worked for TWA as a flight attendant and also worked as a union activist. Since 1990 I've been creating art-- first with growing, drying and crafting with flowers and herbs. Since 1994 I designed and quilted over 130 quilts. During the same period I taught classes, and gave lectures, programs and trunk shows in the region. The adventure of following different avenues in the quilting world keeps stimulating my imagination as does creating dynamic designs for your website. 

About Jeanne: Using 80 column keypunched cards was the only way to communicate with the huge mainframe computer housed at the computing center at the University of Kansas. This was 1974 and I was working on a doctoral degree in social psychology, using the computer to analyze the data collected in research projects. Both the computers and I have come a long way since then! 

Since 1990. I've worked largely as a programmer and computer consultant both at the University of Arkansas and as a self-employed entrepreneur. Over the years I've used many different computer languages (from FORTRAN to Visual Basic), operating systems (from DOS to UNIX to Windows), and kinds of software (from SPSS and SAS to Access). At Quilt Professionals we create our websites using a wide variety of tools including: Javascript, VBscript, Active Server Pages, ASP.NET, Access, Dreamweaver, Frontpage, and Photoshop.

I'm also experienced as a writer and technical writer. I've written magazine articles for Psychology Today, edited a women's journal, and developed a computer manual for AT&T. While working on the faculty at the University of Arkansas, I published a number of scholarly articles. We use my writing experience in helping create and edit the text for your website.

Anonymous Was a Woman (size: 42" x 62") Created by Paula Mariedaughter and Anonymous. Judging by the antique fabrics in this pieced Blazing Star, the unfinished top could have been sewn between 1875 and 1900. The colors were vibrant and the fabric strong leading me to believe it had been stored by caring hands for the last 100 years. What better way to honor the original maker and those who preserved this artifact than to turn the unfinished top into a quilt?

My mind told me I needed a reproduction looking fabric for the background. My eye insisted on this batik with small splotches of color similar to the distinctive chrome yellow of the late 1800s. I created borders using modern fabrics similar to those in the original star.