Allie's Biography

Allison Aller has been stitching, sewing, knitting, and writing since she was a child....and that child is alive and well in the joyful work she creates today in the field of crazy quilting and now, stained glass quilting too.

After earning her degree in Design and Environmental Analysis from Cornell University in 1977, Allie has been quilting non-stop. She made bed quilts, Broderie Perse, stained glass quilts, and landscape quilts for two and an half decades and these approaches still inform her creativity...for the past twelve years, the sumptuous and liberating genre of crazy quilting has been her focus. She then became fascinated by the confluence of vintage traditional quilting and crazy quilting. Now she has turned her attention to stained glass quilts, with her new book, Allie Aller's Stained Glass Quilts Reimagined: Fresh Technques and Design, due in February 2017.

Her work has appeared in Quilters Newsletter Magazine, American Quilter, the $100,000 Quilt Challenge, Needlepoint Now, and the Way to Womens Wellness Art Bra Calendars (cover, 2007), as "guest artist" in several books, and in her own Allie Aller's Crazy Quilting, C & T Publishing, 2011.  Quilts...A Little Bit Crazy, co-authored with fellow crazy quilter Valerie Bothell, was published in May 2014.

She is an instructor for www.Craftsy.com and teaches "Crazy Quilting" online for them.

Her awards include:

First Place, Crazy Quilts, American Quilters' Society Show in Nashville, TN 2003
Second Place, Embellished Quilts, International Quilt Association Show in Houston, TX 2008
First Place, Alliance for American Quilts' My Quilts/Our History contest, 2008
Second Place, Embellished Quilts, International Quilt Association Show in Houston, TX 2010
First Place, The Great Pink Bandana Challenge, Simplicity Creative Group, 2011
Grand Prize, DMC Memories Contest, 2013
Second Place, Crazy Quilts, American Quilters' Society Show in Lancaster, PA 2015

Her first commercially produced pattern, "Pretty Crazy", offers an introduction to crazy quilting for those who want to work by machine, not by hand. It is offered by Brookshier Design Studio.
Her publisher, C & T, has also come out with a deck of playing cards featuring details from some of her quilts, and included her work in their "Quilted Masterpieces" Datekeeper.

Allie has been blogging steadily since 2005 and invites you to come visit her blog, AlliesInStitches, where she posts works-in-progress photos, tutorials, and links to other fine stitchers' works. Note especially the rich archive of subjects in the keywords on the right side of her blog. She is a board member emeritus of the Quilt Alliance (formerly the Alliance for American Quilts) a non profit organization dedicated to documenting, preserving, and sharing the work and stories of quilters around the world.

She enjoys teaching crazy piecing and embellishment, and now stained glass quilts-both functional and decorative--and loves meeting other stitchers all over the country at both national conferences and local guilds. Her teaching schedule can all be found on a separate page on her blog.

Her other passion is gardening, which she shares with her husband, Robert, in their country home outside of Portland, Oregon. They have two wonderful grown sons, and a fabulous daughter-in-law.