Mary Hickey

Mary Hickey has been a leader in the quilting world for more than twenty-five years. She continually brings new techniques, designs, and ideas to quilt making. When she was younger, Mary taught and lectured all over the world. Now she has turned her energies to creating fresh looking quilts, clever techniques, and updated patterns. Her current passion is to make quilting easy and understandable to everyone. She is working on a new version of her best-selling book, The Joy of Quilting, and making this web site useful and fun. Mary lives in the Northwestern coastal area of Washington state, where she thoroughly enjoys her family, especially her grandchildren, Audrey, Ava, and Nicholas. Mary loves quilts, toys, and listening to baseball and opera. She spends a huge amount of time reading or listening to books on her i-pod. Matroyshka or nesting dolls seem to collect on her shelves. She started with one nesting toy about the time her first child was born and they just keep finding their way into her house. Their little smiling faces watch over the whole family. As a member of several groups, Mary does volunteer sewing for kids in shelters, premature babies and folks in nursing homes. Quilts keep stacking up on her shelves and on the beds. The family home over-looks Liberty Bay, a deep-water bay on Puget Sound. She loves to play with her grandchildren---card games, board games, tea parties, cooking, craft projects, beach combing just to name a few of their activities. Mary's primary goal in designing, writing, and teaching is always the same: she wants to design projects and write directions that enable quilt makers to create beautiful quilts that look complex, artistic, and stunning but that are easy to make.