Meet Sharon: Our Quilting Guru and Volunteer Extraordinaire

Volunteer Spotlight: Like many of The Nest Community volunteers, Sharon loves sharing her craft knowledge with The Nest Haberdashery customers. What many customers don’t know, Sharon is also an award-winning quilt artist.

Sharon first met The Nest Community’s co-founder, Roz Holt, when she did an upcycling workshop with her. Captivated by Roz’s vision for the community, Sharon thought:

Wow, this is incredible. How do women create these things?”

Not long after, Sharon decided to volunteer and has been part of the organisation for nearly 7 years.

“It was interesting to see the mechanics of it all when I started. When we were in the house at Everton Park, we used to bring out the crates of things for sale onto the verandah. If we made $25-$30 in sales we thought we’d had a pretty good morning. Gladys [Roz’s mother] used to count the takings and would be pretty excited at those amounts”. 

Growing up, Sharon’s mother and sister made the family’s clothes, a tradition Sharon continued with her own children. Sharon was particularly keen to be involved with the Exchange Project. a program designed to mentor vulnerable girls through craft.

“Like everyone else who has mentored for the Exchange Project, I was very impressed with the young girls and how they developed confidence and skills”.

When asked, Sharon says that embroidery is her craft of choice and describes herself as a self-taught quilter. 

I was never a quilter but planned to learn when I retired. Then, when I got to my 40s, my friends started saying ‘why don’t you just learn now’. I’m not a traditional quilter. I use things like cutwork linen and doilies rather than haberdashery fabrics. I love the upholstery remnants and swatches to make into  fabric collage quilts.

For Sharon the attraction of collage quilting is that you don’t need very big pieces of fabric – it’s the ultimate scrap-busting project regardless of pattern or colour.

“You’d be surprised. Sometimes a fabric with a cactus pattern might make a great eyebrow and you only need a piece as big as your palm!”

The process of collage quilting is akin to painting with fabrics where you are layering and adding wadding to create dimension.

When Sharon embarked on reproducing  [with the artist’s permission] a portrait by Mark Norval she would often take a photo in sepia to check that each piece had the right value and ‘popped’ where it needed to.

“I thought, I have to get the eyes and nose right before I can do anything else. It took me three attempts on the nose!”

The process is painstaking and it took 12 months to complete a 1 metre squared quilt. You’d be forgiven if you thought the finished quilt was a painting. In 2021 the quilt won Queensland Quilters second top prize, The Bernina Amateur Award.

Sharon volunteers on Fridays and is one of our experts that maintain The Nest Haberdashery’s stunning quilt display. In addition to her shift, she has ‘homework’   which involves taking home crates of donated quilting fabric to prepare it for sale.

I probably spend about 6 hours a week sorting and measuring at home. Quilt fabrics are presorted into crates at the donations table. I take them home, do another sort, measure and price them”.

While looking at fabric is one of her favourite things to do, people remain the primary reason Sharon volunteers.

“I love connecting with the other women, their experience and life, what they make, what they are involved in.  I love seeing the customers excited about what they’re buying to make”. 

It’s incredible to think that just 7 years ago, it was just a few crates of reclaimed textile resources. Since relocating to Brendale in 2023, The Nest Haberdashery now processes over 5000 litres of textiles each week and attracts customers from all over Australia.

“We’ve even had a customer from New York buying doilies to take home and use in projects”.

Just as Sharon uncovered her own hidden talent for quilting, it’s also possible to uncover hidden talent, right here in Brisbane’s maker community.

We had a customer who was part of the Royal School of Needlework based at Hampton Court Palace and had been about her experiences and to think that someone who was part of the coronation now lives just a few suburbs away from us”

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