Shaina Naillieux

Shaina Naillieux (she/her) grew up in the quilt shop run by her mother and grandmother in Breathitt County, Kentucky, and started learning to piece her own quilts at age 6. “For so many people throughout the Appalachian region, quilting is a legacy,” she says. “It's a story, in art, that their foremothers wrote with thread.”

Shaina now runs her own quilting business, Sew Knot Fancy, where she still uses the pattern books her mother and grandmother passed down and repairs other family’s treasured heirlooms. “The story these quilts tell can be one of poverty or one of wealth,” Shaina describes. “Many quilts are made of whatever fabric they had on hand—be that old curtains, dresses, dress pants, jeans, flour sacks, old sheets—whatever they could sacrifice. Often their patterns couldn't be quite perfect because they ran out of a specific fabric, and often they couldn't just go to a store to pick up more. But they made it work, and the work they produced was absolutely beautiful. Throughout the hardship, they chose to make something beautiful for such an important task, the task of keeping a loved one warm.”

Shaina is already teaching two of her five young daughters to quilt. “It's been absolutely amazing watching her thumb through fabrics, some of which belonged to her great-grandmother, to pick out fabric for her next quilt,” Shaina says of her eldest daughter. “She enjoys quilting them just as much as she does piecing them and has been asking to quilt more and more.” Shaina still quilts with her mother as well—they recently worked together to create a thirty-foot-long quilt titled Our Breathitt, displayed at the Breathitt County High School graduation ceremony.

Shaina will use her Emerging Traditional Artists Program award to study historical quilt patterns, starting with a visit to the archives of the National Quilt Museum in Paducah, Kentucky. She hopes to develop her research into teaching tools, to share what she learns.