About Frank & Barbara Pespisa
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| Pine Tree Quilts of Vermont About Frank & Barbara Pespisa |
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| The early years.... | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| I have always loved quilts - I don't know where this came from. Although my mother was an excellent seamstress and made dresses for my sister and me, she never made a quilt and we didn't have any in the house. I made my first quilt, a doll quilt, under my mother's guidance when I was seven. I inherited my love of sewing from her, and made many of my own clothes. By the time I met my future husband, in 1978, I had a big bag of scraps and a wish to make a real quilt. | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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| A dreamer meets a man of action... | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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| While I'm a dreamer, Frank is a doer (A perfect match!). I taught him how to use the sewing machine, and shortly thereafter, I came down with mononucleosis. While he was taking care of me and spending long hours at my apartment, he started cutting up scraps and made our first quilt, a scrap-bag log cabin. We decided to make two , one for him and one for me, so for his next project, he decided on a Tumbling Blocks. Although it's a difficult pattern for a beginning sewer, he did a great job, and we still have that quilt on our bed at home. | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Just one more pattern... | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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| As any quilt lover knows, there is always "one more pattern" you have to try, and soon we were making quilts for friends and family. We found out that Frank was great at cutting and machine sewing, while I was better at designing and hand sewing. After some frustration in trying to learn how to do the quilting stitch, I took a one-hour lesson from Nancy Halpern, who lived nearby. | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Off to the country... | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| That was the sum total of our "formal education" in quiltmaking. When all our friends and family had quilts, we started selling them at craft shows in and around Cambridge, MA, where we lived. Two years after we met, we got married and moved to an old house in the country in New Hampshire, where we continued quilting and expanding our business while trying to "live off the land" and building a new house next to the old one. It was a nine room colonial and soon after we moved in, we had quilting materials and supplies stored in all the rooms except the bathrooms! | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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| Eight hundred and counting... | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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| In the late 1980's, we decided to look for a place with more land and wound up building a small house on a beautiful hilltop in Vermont. We put all the extra fabric in the attic, and kept on making quilts. To date, we have made over 800. | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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| When we're not making quilts... | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| As a side line, we started buying antique quilts, cleaning and repairing them, and selling them. We also do restoration work for other people who have cherished heirloom quilts that they want to preserve. | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| In conclusion... | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| We take a lot of pride in our work and offer a moneyback guarantee on anything we make, as we don't want anyone to be unhappy with their purchase. We have made all kinds of quilts over the years, but we specialize in the old-fashioned "scrap-bag" type, with dozens or possibly hundreds of different fabrics in each quilt. (Of course, unlike the old days, we use only new fabric.) Frank, who cuts up the scraps, hates to throw anything away, so he has developed a whole line of wall hangings made up of tiny squares, 5/8" on each side. | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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