HER | Love in every stitch: 'I am a fabri-holic,' Bettie Huntley says

For the beholder, it is impossible not to consider all the painstaking detail work required to bring a quilt to completion.
Bettie Huntley would have it no other way. She has been creating quilts for a quarter century or more, and has more than 50 to her credit. Each one tells a story and each story is more fascinating than the last. And at 75, she shows no signs of parting ways with her passion.
For the beholder, it is impossible not to consider all the painstaking detail work required to bring a quilt to completion. Bettie Huntley would have it no other way. She has been creating quilts for a quarter century or more, and has more than 50 to her credit. Each one tells a story and each story is more fascinating than the last. And at 75, she shows no signs of parting ways with her passion.

Now a grandmother and great-grandmother herself, Bettie has been quilting for about 25 years and had 10 of her quilts featured in the recent 19th annual Regional Celebration of African American Artists Exhibit.

Because of her grandmother, Bettie grew up literally under quilts.

"My sister and first cousin and I would play under the quilt frames. Unfortunately, my mother didn't sew and neither did my aunt, but their mother sewed all the time. She made us dresses all the time, even out of flour sacks," Bettie said, adding that flour sack dresses are considered antiques now.

Bettie's first love in the domestic arts was sewing, not piecing quilts.

"I wasn't even thinking about quilting," she said. "I was in high school when my grandmother passed away. I started making my clothes when I was in eighth grade and I just sewed, sewed, sewed. I made table runners and tablecloths. I made tote bags, lots of tote bags. I found several I had cut out but never made."

Bettie sewed until her only son out of six children graduated high school in the mid-1990s. Then, her interest turned to quilting.

"I recalled the fun my granny and her friends had at quilt bees. I don't remember them piecing the quilts, but sewing them. I was hooked once I got to piecing. I got lots of quilt books. I will probably never make a quilt out of each one of them I have done arts, crafts, beads, tablecloths and table runners. I decided I wanted to do quilts."

She has taken and taught several quilting classes through the years.

"The first class was supposed to be at least a quilt with 12 blocks. She let us do it on the sewing machine and I thought it was taking an awful long time, so I did six blocks and called it done," she said with her trademark laugh.

Bettie estimates she has pieced more than 50 quilts since the mid-1990s.

"I piece. The majority of people will tell you they made a quilt, but they basically pieced it You can do it on a regular sewing machine, but it takes so much effort. With long machines you would need a big space because the machine has an arm as long as the quilt is.

"There are three parts to a quilt," she said. "The top, center and the back. It is not a quilt until it is done."

Bettie has some particular color combinations and fabrics she prefers when piecing quilts.

"I like bright fabrics. Purple and yellow are my favorite colors and I was told in the early years you shouldn't put yellow in a quilt and in my granny's quilts she had dull, toned-down yellows," she said. "Even when I was making clothes for my kids, it was bright. But when they told me how to make their clothes, it was time for them to start making their own." She said her favorite type of fabric is batik, which can be used on either side.

"It is one of the more expensive fabrics," Bettie said. "There is no decided right or wrong side. Most of the time it would not be that much different."

She also likes to touch the fabric.

"Some fabrics are hard," she said. "If they are hard, they won't lay right ... Cotton is the best fabric for making quilts but nowadays they do some in silk and they are just gorgeous."

Bettie wishes Texarkana could support a fabric or quilt shop and enjoyed when Sew Fantasy was on Mall Drive

"I can spend half a day in a quilt shop. It makes me feel so good to see what is new and what is available," she said. "I am a fabri-holic. I love fabrics."

Before the pandemic, she was also a faithful attendee of several quilt shows in Houston, Tyler and Jefferson, and she hopes to travel to quilt shows again soon to see so much beauty and creativity.

Bettie said she is in the habit of giving quilts as gifts and on special occasions. In fact, Bettie's 13 grandchildren got a high school graduation gift her six children did not, something she still hears about to this day.

"Whenever my grandkids finished high school, all of them got quilts. I wasn't quilting when my kids were in high school, and they have mentioned they didn't get a quilt."

She has since made it right.

One Christmas, she planned to give quilts to several people. But by Christmastime the quilts were not finished and she had to give IOUs for Christmas, but she made good on the quilt deliveries.

For Bettie, quilts are simultaneously functional and works of art.

"I don't buy bedspreads," she said.

"To me, a quilt is big enough to go on a bed. I have a full-size bed and make my quilts so they hang down. Most of my quilts are king. I hang some on a rack, I have one hanging on the back of a couch, but there is always one on the bed," she said.

She also has made smaller quilts, sometimes known as wall quilts or baby quilts.

"At one point when I would make baby quilts, I would take pictures and put them in a book, but somehow I lost it along the way."

Though an accomplished and highly recognized seamstress, Bettie doesn't believe she has seen, learned or done it all.

"I took several classes and that teaches you so many different things, but you have to keep it up to be able to keep going. I don't think I can learn it all, so I am constantly reading and trying something new," Bettie said.

For those interested in the art form of piecing quilts, Bettie offers some dos and donts.

"Just go for it," she said. "There are a lot of easy patterns like Turning 20 It might look complicated, but it is not. I would not advise starting out with one-half inch squares. Do some reading before quilting, find you a pattern and don't get anything that has circles in it. I don't have no problem with circles, but I'm sure they could frighten some. Also, you have to like fabric, I think, to be a good quilter. You also have to have just a desire to see something you have done with your own hands."

Quilting has been on the decline, but she is hopeful it will experience a resurgence, particularly among younger women.

She also has advice for those storing quilts.

"One of my original quilt teachers told me, 'do not store quilts in garbage bags In the long haul they will sweat and it will cause the quilts to become damp and break the threads down. After she told me that, I read that somewhere else. In the olden days, my granny stored them in her cedar chest. My aunt had some beautiful ones she had bought. She had them in her cedar chest."

At 75, Bettie has built a life of service to others by volunteering. "I did a little bit of everything to keep up with my kids," she said, noting she was a 4-H leader for decades and also volunteered with Girl Scouts. In 2019, she was selected as Miller County's first University of Arkansas Extension Service Volunteer of the year.

"I will be 76 in July," she said. "I thought when you got in your 70s, you were old, but that's not true anymore."

Bettie still takes small fabric remnants of life and makes a rich, comforting kaleidoscope of color that warms the body and soul.

"There's love in every stitch," she said.

Upcoming Events