Helping quilters spend less time searching and more time quilting.

About Chris Cross Quilts & More

Hi, I’m Chris

I’m a wife, mother of six, grandmother of seven, nurse practitioner, lifelong learner, and self-taught quilter.

I did not grow up sewing at my grandmother’s knee. I do not have a touching story about making my first quilt from a treasured bundle of inherited fabric. I came to sewing later in life, started with very little idea what I was doing, and promptly became fascinated by all of it.

I wanted to understand why one fabric behaved differently from another. I wanted to know which tools were genuinely useful and which ones merely looked convincing in the package. I wanted to learn where traditional quilt blocks came from, why certain techniques worked, how color changed a design, and whether there was a better way to do whatever I had just done incorrectly.

Once something captures my attention, I have never been especially good at remaining casually interested.

By profession, I’m a nurse practitioner. Research, education, and helping people make informed decisions have been part of my work for decades. I am accustomed to asking questions, examining the available evidence, and translating complicated information into something people can actually use.

Those habits followed me into the sewing room.

Why Chris Cross Exists

The quilting world contains an astonishing amount of information. There are books, patterns, videos, classes, rulers, gadgets, fabrics, techniques, traditions, and strongly held opinions about nearly all of them.

Much of that information is excellent. Some of it is incomplete. Some advice gets repeated so often that nobody remembers where it originated—or whether it was accurate in the first place. And sometimes the answer you need is buried in the seventeenth video you watch.

Chris Cross Quilts & More is where I sort through all of that.

I research quilt history and the stories attached to traditional patterns. I compare books, tools, techniques, and resources. I look for reliable teachers who explain things well. I explore fabric, color, construction, and the small details that can make quilting either more enjoyable or unnecessarily frustrating.

When someone else has already created an outstanding tutorial, I would rather point you toward it than recreate an inferior version simply to keep you on my website. My goal is not to pretend I invented the half-square triangle. It is to help you find trustworthy information, understand what you are doing, and spend more of your limited time actually making something.

The Making Matters Too

Research may explain how something works, but quilting is not only an academic exercise.

It is choosing fabric and then reconsidering every choice once the cutting begins. It is watching separate pieces become something that did not exist before. It is learning a new technique, discovering that it requires considerably more practice than the instructor made apparent, and deciding whether to try again.

My own sewing room is rarely devoted to only one kind of project. I make quilts, bags, clothing, appliqué, embroidery, and whatever else has recently convinced me that I need another creative interest. Some projects are carefully planned. Others begin because I found an interesting technique and wanted to know whether I could do it.

Not everything works the first time. Blocks come out the wrong size. Projects stall. Colors that looked beautiful in a stack occasionally begin arguing once they are sewn together. I share those parts too—not to make incompetence my quilting identity, but because honest experience is more useful than pretending every project proceeds exactly as planned.

I am still learning, as every thoughtful maker is. The difference between a new quilter and an experienced one is not that the experienced quilter has stopped making mistakes. She has simply developed a larger collection of possible explanations.

What You’ll Find Here

Quilt History explores the people, traditions, materials, and changing ideas behind the quilts we make.

Chris’s Quilting Notebook gathers carefully researched information about tools, books, fabric, techniques, color, and trusted quilting resources.

The Saturday Stitch Report is an honest look at what has been happening in my sewing room—including completed projects, genuine progress, neglected works in progress, and plans that may have been slightly too optimistic.

The Sewing Chair is where quilting and everyday life meet. These Sunday reflections consider why making matters, what creativity gives us, and what may be stitched into a quilt while the rest of life is happening around it.

You will also find beginner-friendly guidance throughout the site. I remember what it was like to encounter unfamiliar terminology, conflicting advice, and instructions written for people who apparently arrived already knowing how to quilt. Beginners deserve clear explanations without being talked down to.

Pull Up a Chair

Chris Cross Quilts & More is for people who enjoy learning as much as making.

You may be choosing fabric for your first quilt, investigating the history of a block you have made for years, comparing tools before spending your money, or looking for company while you work through the projects already waiting in your sewing room.

Wherever you are in your quilting life, you are welcome here.

We can learn something, make something, appreciate the generations of makers who came before us, and laugh when the supposedly simple project develops opinions of its own.

Pull up a chair. I’m glad you found your way here.