“Quilting is a very forgiving medium,” says Humboldt fiber artist Angie Tustison. “When I was starting out, my designs didn’t have to be perfect to look nice, whereas the mistakes I made in my drawings or paintings tended to stand out.” She also loved the colors and textures of the range of fabrics available to her.
Tustison is one of four local artists granted the 2024 Victor Thomas Jacoby award bestowed annually by the Humboldt Area Foundation and Wild Rivers Community Foundation for “artistic vision and creativity.” The $10,000 award has already helped her build her website angietustison.com.
A Freshwater kid, she grew up surrounded by redwood forests. “Living in such a beautiful place had a big impact on me, which carries through to my artwork today,” she says. She got started as a teenager, when she saw quilts at the Redwood Acres Fair and decided she wanted to make one for her bed. A neighbor taught Tustison how to use a sewing machine and later, she and her mom bought the neighbor’s machine.
Her quilting practice leapt forward in 2013, when Tustison’s husband gave her the book Mosaic Picture Quilts by renowned Eureka quilter Pat Durbin. That year Tustison also won a membership to the Redwood Empire Quilters Guild. Since then, her quilts have won more than 29 awards at national and international shows across the United States. Many of her pieces are based in Humboldt County, but she also depicts scenes in San Francisco, Southern California, Oregon and other places she and her husband travel to on vacation. Her “Palace of Fine Arts,” which shows a woman walking her dog in the San Francisco park, has won six awards nationally.
Tustison is partial to pictorial quilts, which are designs that show a scene or tell a story. She starts by taking a photo, enlarging it to the size she wants for the finished quilt, and printing it out in 8-by-11-inch sections. These she tapes together to make a full-size photo pattern, cutting pieces out to trace onto the fabrics. After tracing, she cuts out the fabric pieces and glues them onto a piece of interfacing or background fabric to create the picture. Once the picture is glued together to make the quilt top, she adds the batting and backing, then stitches all the layers together.
Sometimes she incorporates smaller quilt shapes into a larger one, cutting and gluing them in place on a grid before stitching them together. She uses free motion quilting stitches, which entails changing the setup of the sewing machine so that it doesn’t pull the fabric through the machine, like “regular” sewing. This gives her the freedom to move the bulky fabric in any direction — back and forth, side to side, or making patterns, loops and swirls.
In her Manila home, she has two sewing machines: a modern one and a 1927 Singer 101 that her mom found on a curb in Mckinleyville. Tustison cleaned up the old machine, restored the wood cabinet and now uses it for straight stitch sewing and piecing.
Her quilts are labor-intensive. A 6-foot-square quilt takes her about 500 hours to complete.
Tustison is currently the President of the Redwood Empire Quilters Guild, as well as chairperson of the website committee. She credits the guild for improving her quilting skills and her confidence in sharing her craft. “Artistically, I would not be where I am today if it weren’t for my quilting community,” she says.
Her livelihood consists of a mix of gardening, quilting and seamstress work. “The gardening work is a nice way to balance everything out,” she says, “especially as some of my gardening clients are quilters who I met through the Guild. Whether sewing, quilting or gardening, my work involves helping my clients with their creative projects.”
One of Tustison’s goals is to express feelings and ideas through imagery. For example, she made a quilt memorial for her mother, who loved owls. The quilt, “Secret World,” shows a mother owl in a redwood forest with three young owls on the side. The three small owls represent her and her two younger siblings. “I chose the title because I felt like she created a sort of secret, magical world for myself and my siblings while we were growing up, and it’s also the title of a song she loved,” she says. “I think a lot about what I want my art to say and how to connect with the viewer through each piece.”
Tustison also wants to teach. She is currently developing a workshop on how to quilt pet portraits, and another on how to incorporate tiny layered blocks within a larger quilt, which she will offer through the guild in the spring. Her vision is to combine quilting, teaching, and travel.
She will have a quilt on display at the group exhibition Beyond the Page: A Focus on Sculpture and Fiber 2025 at the Redwood Art Association Gallery (603 F St. in Eureka) from Nov. 18 through Dec. 12.
Louisa Rogers (she/her) is a writer, painter and paddleboarder who lives in Eureka and Guanajuato, Mexico.
This article appears in Klamath River Ecosystem Booming One Year After Dam Removal.
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