Quilting Sisters Share Their Passion with Statesville
by Candace Lagerhausen
Sisters Cindy Page and Patti Cline have shared a love for quilting since they were very young. “Our mom taught us how to sew, we were always sewing something”, Patti shared. In 1982, Patti and Cindy opened The Quilter’s Gallery in Charlotte, and ran it for 25 years, before deciding to close their brick-and-mortar store to focus on participating in shows. Today, The Quilter’s Gallery is fully online with their quilting supplies, offering classes, and participating in road shows. The Quilter’s Gallery also partners with local quilters guilds to offer workshops, and participate in their shows as vendors.
Eleven years ago, Cindy and Patti had the idea to host a quilting show. While there are many larger regional and national shows, The Quilter’s Gallery was too small to attend those. Instead, they gathered some of their friends with businesses in the industry to host their own show here in Statesville. “We decided if we all worked together, we could promote each other and be in one place and let customers come to us”, Patti said. Being a smaller show, the sisters weren’t expecting many people to attend, but they quickly found the show to be wildly successful, with far more attendees than they anticipated. “We had no idea how many people we would have, but we were overwhelmed”, said Cindy.