Wendi Gratz lives with her family and her sewing machine just down the road from penland School of Crafts in western North Carolina. She skipped Home Ec in high school in favor of wood and metal shop, and didn't learn to use a sewing machine until she was in college. Her first project was a badly-made tablecloth. She learned a lot from that disastrous tablecloth; her second project was designing and making all the costumes for a play.

Now Wendi makes a lot of quilts. She was initially attracted to the lovely dense texture of puckery antique scrap quilts that used hundreds of different fabrics, but she also loved the more contemporary style and bold graphic design of Amish quilts. She set out to design quilts that feature the best of both these styles.

Wendi Gratz's signature strip-piecing style marries the rich texture and scrappy look of antique quilts with simple graphic images inspired by Amish quilts. She makes each quilt by hand, one at a time, and pieces improvisationally - with no patterns - so no two quilts are alike. A typical queen-sized quilt has over 2,300 pieces in it, each one carefully selected, cut, sewn, and pressed. She uses a 100% cotton batting and finishes each quilt with machine quilting, then binds the edges by hand and signs and dates the work.