Quilter parts with extensive stock

WILLIAMSBURG — Barb Wardenburg of Williamsburg has been creating quilt designs in her shop for nearly 30 years. The owner of Rainbows and Calico Things Quilt Shop will sell many of the quilts she’s created this weekend, donating half of the profits to local charities.

Many of the quilts available for purchase Friday and Saturday at the Johnson County Fairgrounds are samples for kits Wardenburg has sold through the years. “These are now retired items,” said Wardenburg. “The fabrics are gone or I don’t do the kits anymore. It’s time to sell them.”

Wardenburg won’t sell everything she’s created. “I still kept my babies,” she said. When she’s designed a quilt and taught an idea, “it’s like a baby. You just don’t want to part with it.”

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But Wardenburg is keeping only about 10. She’s made “four stacks of quilts that need a new home” in her shop on 240th Street east of Williamsburg. By number, that’s more than 80 quilts. She has more than 70 other items, such as table runners, for sale.

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“I’ve given quilts to my brothers and sisters,” said Wardenburg. (There are six of them.) “And they’ve gotten two or three.” Still, she has a shop full of quilts.

“There comes a point when you’ve gotten enough,” Wardenburg said.

Half the proceeds will go to Rural Employment Alternative in Conroy, an agency that provides services to people with disabilities, Coralville Food Pantry; and the Violence Intervention Program in Johnson County.

Wardenburg has been sewing since she was 11 years old, she said. She even patched quilts, “but we just tied them.”

Wardenburg didn’t start quilting until after she was married. She had an idea for a 4-H project for your youngest sister — a family memory. “We needed to learn how to quilt it,” Wardenburg said, so they contacted her husband’s aunt, who taught them.

Since then, Wardenburg has created patterns and pieced quilts. She pays someone else to quilt them for her now, but she continues to sew the quilts herself.

Wardenburg cuts fabric for kits of her designs, “and I try to make a good price out it,” she said. “I try to teach them something.”

She also sells all the supplies quilters need for any project — fabric, cutters, rulers, squares. “I have people who come here on a regular basis,” Wardenburg said.

One day in early November, Sandra Mossman, of Parnell, and Lois Berry, of Williamsburg, stopped to see Wardenburg. “We’ve known her since she was a kid,” said Mossman. “She’s got beautiful fabric, and her kits are wonderful. Everyone loves them.”

When someone asks Mossman for quilting supplies “I say, go see Barb.”

Berry has been quilting for 30 years, and buys her supplies from Wardenburg. “This is a big selection. We are very lucky.”

Not all of Wardenburg’s customers are local. Wardensburg has customers from all over the United States, she said.

Mossman’s daughter, who lives in Wisconsin, comes down to the Williamsburg shop for quilting supplies, Mossman said.

Wardenburg will part with more than 150 of her quilted items Friday from 11 a.m. to 6 p.m. and Sunday from 9 a.m. to 3 p.m. at the Johnson County Fairgrounds Building C, 4261 Oak Crest Hill Rd. SE in Iowa City.

Wardenburg will offer items in a range of prices, from $100 for smaller items to $1,200 for the largest, most complex quilts.