Greensburg woman: 'I'm a quilter who doesn't like to quilt'

Despite describing herself as “a quilter who doesn’t like to quilt,” Ginnie Leiner of Greensburg has more than 196 quilts to her credit, having taught herself the craft in her late teens in the 1970s.

“It’s a passion,” said Leiner. “An obsession, my husband would say.”

More than a dozen of Leiner’s 196 quilts were on display Sunday at the Westmoreland Museum of American Art’s “Self-Taught Series,” an outgrowth of its “Gatecrashers” exhibition, which showcases local self-taught artists and their specialties.

From the warm colors of fall to the bright reds and greens of Christmas, Leiner was on hand to talk about her craft, on a day when she was not serving as the museum’s membership and development coordinator — her day job.

“I took one quilting class way back in the ’70s, and it helped me get the basics down,” Leiner said. “From there, everyone can sort of go on their own quilting journey. You can go the traditional or the non-traditional route.”

Leiner’s route has come down on both sides of that line depending on which quilt she’s describing.

“This one has strips of fabric, but no discernible block,” Leiner said of a non-traditional, Halloween-themed quilt she made for her husband. “It looks random, but of course when you’re quilting, everything is tremendously planned.”

Leiner still hews to the old-school method of using graph paper to design her quilts.

“It may start out one way on graph paper, and then it ends up going another way,” she said. “You have to ‘listen to the quilt.’”

But when it comes to putting needle to fabric, Leiner has modernized.

“The last few years, I’ve been working with a woman in Blairsville, Karen Frye, who I send my patterns to,” she said. “Then she does the quilting with a long-arm quilting machine that’s operated by computer software.”

Plenty of the quilts on display, however, were the work of Leiner’s own hands, including a Christmas quilt that she started in 1985 and didn’t officially finish until 17 years later, in 2002.

Leiner said her biggest challenge is keeping things fresh and finding room in her schedule.

“I have so many ideas for quilts,” she said. “I just need the time.”