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Linda Fisher

Quiltmaker

  United States    

Museum of Texas Tech University

A prolific quilter from West Texas.
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Linda Fisher was a prolific quilter beginning with her first quilt as an adult beginning in 1994 and continuing through the present (2019). She taught many people in West Texas to quilt.  She was a member of the Lubbock day quilt guild (The South Plains Quilt Guild) and the Caprock Art Quilters.  She loved to take old blocks and finish quilts and to put her own artistic twist on traditional quilt patterns.

As a young girl, Linda Timmons Fisher was given needlework projects by her Mother to keep her occupied after school while her Mother worked. Linda thinks it was an easy way for her Mother to be sure she wasn’t on the phone with boys. Her Mother checked the project progress each day. As an adult Linda developed her embroidery skills, earning several master levels for her work through the Embroiderers’ Guild of America. As it happened the needlework shop was next to the quilt shop in Lubbock at the end of the 1990s and while getting supplies at the needlework shop, Linda became transfixed by the wall of color of the fabrics in the quilt shop. Encouraged by shop owner and quilt historian, Sharon Newman, and employee, Jackie Reis, Linda switched from embroidery to quilt making. Linda knew Jackie Reis because she was in charge of the Embroiderers’ Guild of America Master Craftsman program in Quilting that Linda had completed. Linda excelled as a quiltmaker and was soon teaching budding quiltmakers across West Texas in shops and at quilt shows. Linda’s cheerful personality encouraged many to develop their quilting skills under her tutelage. Linda brings a unique eye to quilt making, always altering a pattern in an interesting way. With the arrival at the Museum of Texas Tech University of a curator who understood the world of quilt making, Mrs. Fisher stepped in to aid the development of the collection by donating pieces that had been made by other quiltmakers in West Texas and helping to see that the ephemera and quilts made by Jackie Reis and patterns developed by her were preserved at the Museum. Between 2015 and 2020, Mrs. Fisher offered over 100 quilts to the Museum for its collection. Over 70 were selected and Mrs. Fisher then chose to auction the remaining pieces to benefit an Endowment for the Curator of Clothing and Textiles position working to ensure that someone would always be employed to care for the quilted treasures. It is very rare for an institution to have more than a handful of quilts by one maker. Mrs. Fisher’s generous donation enables researchers to study quilt making in West Texas at the end of the 20th century and beginning of the 21st century.

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