Connie Bloom, Quilt Artist and Memorialist

The name Connie Bloom is familiar to newspaper junkies who read her columns and feature stories in Knight Ridder newspapers for many years. While she was once best known for her inimitable prose, her passion for the written word inevitably took a back seat to her compulsion for fabric and Connie reinvented herself as a textile artist. 

Patrons and former readers are quick to recognize Connie’s compelling visual language as that of matching her lyrical newspaper voice. She is doing what she has always done, she says, but with a different set of tools.  

“Instead of the written word, I am harnessing the infinite wisdom of stitch and cloth to tell my stories,” says Connie, “It takes me to the same place.”

Connie's award winning art quilts, which look like paintings but are made of fabric, beads, thread, paint and the ingredients du jour, have been featured in local and regional galleries and festivals and solo exhibitions. She calls herself a purist and hand dyes, hand paints and hand prints much of her cloth, then layers the surface with intricate threadwork using a mechanical sewing machine, “which is like riding a bucking bronco.” The end results employ not a hair of automation anywhere, not even a lowly preprogrammed embroidery stitch.

Connie calls herself a classic renegade but isn’t exactly an outsider, having studied extensively at the Quilt Surface Design Symposium, Columbus College of Art and Design, under a raft of prominent quilt and mixed media artists, including Fan Skiles, Rosale Dace, Sue Benner, Cynthia Corbin and many others. She is the former publisher and editor of the QSDS Voice, a magazine she created for professional and emerging quilt artists. She is a member of the Studio Art Quilt Associates and Artists of Rubber City.

Connie welcomes commissions of all kinds but has a deep and abiding love of animals and is especially soft on pet portraits, from llamas to snails and dogs, dogs, dogs.

She also heeds a higher calling to the creation of memorial art quilts and cloth books, made from the clothes and personal effects of people who have left this good earth. The finished piece becomes a family heirloom to be passed down through the generations. Please click here for photos and more information about the sensitive creation of memorials.