When photographers and stylists from Better Homes & Gardens’ Quilt Sampler Magazine came to Durango last fall to shoot the downtown quilt shop Stitch for its Spring/Summer 2021 issue, it was kept a secret until just recently.
Stitch, 858 Main Ave., offers fabrics, notions, patterns and sewing machines. The 2,600-square-foot shop also offers classes and sewing machine repairs. It’s been open in Durango for just about seven years, and last June moved to its new location on Main Avenue right in the heart of downtown, a move that allowed the shop to be “alongside other independent, locally owned business owners,” said LeeAnn Vallejos, who co-owns the shop with her husband, Mark Rosenberg.
The shop was featured in the magazine as one of the top 10 quilt shops in the nation.
To be selected for the magazine, which hit newsstands last week, Vallejos said the magazine put out a call for shops to apply. There were about 3,000 shops that submitted applications, she said, adding that along with applications, shops were also required to send in photos of the store. Entries were then narrowed down, and if a shop made the final round, Vallejos said, there was another application process and a call for additional photos.
On the net
For more information about Stitch, visit www.stitchonline.net. Copies of Quilt Sampler are available at the shop.
According to a news release about the selection, once the shops have been whittled down, a panel of quilt experts, spearheaded by American Patchwork & Quilting staff members, reviews the applications to select the featured shops.
“Then they make their final choice and they select 10. Once you’re selected, they send out a professional photographer and stylists to do the whole photo shoot, which was amazing,” Vallejos said. “They were here last October, they kind of swear you to secrecy until the magazine actually hits.”
It goes without saying the shop was excited to be selected. Not only is Stitch given six pages (plus two pages for a special quilt pattern), the store and quilt are on the issue’s cover.
“We have a really nice spread in the magazine, they allocate about five or six pages to each of the shops,” Vallejos said. “You have to also complete and submit an original quilt design for them to publish in the magazine, so we created a kind of Colorado-themed quilt. And they selected that to be on the cover of the magazine – that was the most exciting piece.”
The quilt designed by Vallejos and Robin Mason is called “Mountain High,” and the pattern is available in the magazine.
Vallejos said that while the art of quilting has stayed consistent in popularity, she has seen an increased interest in people picking up other fiber arts, such as sewing.
“We’ve been seeing – quilting has always been popular, it hasn’t really declined in popularity – but we are seeing a resurgence in making, so, people wanting to make a variety of things, whether it’s garments, or backpacks, or gear, that whole repurposing making has definitely turned a corner,” she said, adding that quilting shouldn’t be seen as something that’s intimidating. “It’s not necessarily hard, there are a lot of steps to it, a little bit of math involved. It’s a time-consuming process, a basic quilt can take 20 hours, and a complex quilt can take much longer than that.”
And now that Stitch has made it onto the national stage, there’s no time to rest: Vallejos said the shop has big plans coming up.
“We’re working on a big summer schedule right now. We always bring in a couple of national instructors over the summer period,” she said. ”We are working on producing our own Durango-themed fabric. We’re designing that right now. We get a lot of tourists saying, ‘Oh, do you have a fabric that kind of reads ‘Durango’?’ And so we decided to create our own. We have a lot of things brewing for sure.“
katie@durangoherald.com
