Designer

Sheila is the owner of Quilters’ Lane, a local quilt shop in Masterton on the North Island of New Zealand. She loves to teach classes, design quilts, and write patterns, and she has been designing her Mystery quilts since 2012. These Mysteries are different as they are not based on a set of blocks but are more like a set of puzzle pieces that come together at the end to create an overall quilt design.

Born in England, Sheila has lived in Switzerland, the Netherlands, North Carolina, and Florida. In 2002 she moved to New Zealand with her family. After an Economics degree and a career in marketing and business, she gained a school teaching qualification at Victoria University and taught primary school in New Zealand and in London. She has been the owner of Quilters’ Lane since 2011 and has been married to Carl, who hails from Las Vegas, since 2012.

Sheila has won awards for her quilts at New Zealand shows and has also been a tutor at the National Symposia. She continues to push the boundaries in her quilting and develop new and different ways of creating quilts. She enjoys a mixture of modern and traditional quilting and always continues to learn, having attended workshops with Joen Wolfrom, Nancy Crow, Sue Spargo, Kathy Doughty, Gail Garber, Susan Brubaker Knapp, and many other wonderful tutors who have visited New Zealand
over the years.

As well as quilting, Sheila loves to go on long walks in the mountains near her home, and has started writing about her walks on her blog at www.mysteryquilter.com. She is very excited to be working with Cotton Cuts on the Mystery quilt and especially loves the fact that the project will be supporting people with disabilities into work.