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Sharlene Jorgenson's Workroom
Shar's Life Story
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SHARLENE JORGENSON'S LIFE STORY
Meet Sharlene Jorgenson of Quilting from the Heartland!
Sharlene
Jorgenson began quilting in the late 1970s. She immediately knew she'd
found a lifelong hobby. With both a business and a family to manage, though,
she had limited time, so she began experimenting to find faster, easier
ways to make quilts.
Even in the 1980s there weren't many options for piecing templates—you generally drew or traced your patterns onto cardboard or plastic, cut them out, traced around the templates onto your fabric with a pencil, and finally cut out the shapes with scissors. This was time-consuming and imprecise. Shar decided to have her own templates laser-cut from 1/8-inch-thick acrylic. These templates could be placed directly onto the fabric for use with a rotary cutter, allowing the quilter to create precise shapes quickly and easily. Sharlene's first template set was for Double Wedding Ring. Today her line includes more than 80 quilt designs.
Shar is now an internationally known quilt designer, template designer, author, speaker, and video and television personality. She teaches her innovative techniques all over the world, to local guilds and community-education classes as well as at the International Quilt Market in Houston, Texas, and events in Europe. Her series, Quilting from the Heartland, airs on public-television stations throughout North America. In recent episodes, Shar's daughter and granddaughter have helped her introduce quilting to new generations. Shar has also appeared as a guest on Kaye Wood's Quilting for the '90s and Aleene's Creative Living.
Shar has written a series of quilting books to accompany her series. In 1996, she won two PJS Product Excellence Awards for her Series 500 book and Wheel of Mystery template set. Two years later, she was named as a finalist in two categories for her Series 700 book and Quilter's Starter Kit template set.
Sharlene's mail-order company, also called Quilting from the Heartland, produces and sells pattern books, how-to videos, acrylic piecing templates, plastic quilting stencils, and other quilting tools and notions. Shar runs the company with the help of her husband and four grown children. They live in Starbuck, Minnesota.
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