by Jeff McDonald, for The Bulletin Special Projects

While some people go to school to become quilters, Karla Alexander learned old-school quilting by watching her mom.

Alexander, named “Inspirational Instructor” for this year’s Sisters Outdoor Quilt Show, remembers how her mother, LaRue Wilcox, would make a quilt for someone to mark a special occasion like the birth of a baby or a graduation.

She would never have made a quilt for a contest, or design one following strict rules of craftsmanship, Alexander said.

“She would be on a mission, thinking and talking about the people as she was making the quilt,” Alexander said. “I was jealous. I would be wondering how she was spending all this time for these people.”

When Alexander was 13, she was having trouble in school, hated sewing and even got kicked out of home economics class, she said. But she had always admired a quilt her mom had made using bits and pieces from her aunt and uncle’s clothing. That year, her mother made her a Christmas quilt that used her own clothing and her brother and sister’s clothing to make a giant quilt, she said.

Quilting became more than a hobby when she and her husband, Don, moved to Kodiak, Alaska, she said. She needed it as a way to survive the dark winters.

“I got my Christmas quilt out and tried to start copying it,” she said. “I didn’t think I had to have a pattern because it was from clothing. I started out like (my mother) did.”

She took a quilting class in Kodiak but disliked the teacher’s rigid rules about balancing colors and patterns.

“I was very unsatisfied with the guidelines,” she said. “It didn’t give me the warm and fuzzy feeling that I had when I watched my mom do it. It was too structured.”

Eventually, she started teaching her own classes, drawing in Coast Guard employees who lived around the tiny Alaskan town.

“The classes started filling,” she said. “It took on a life of its own.”

Alexander imparted a simple teaching philosophy that applied to her mother and women of her generation. She called it WWGD, or What Would Grandma Do?

“She couldn’t get on the Internet. She couldn’t find the perfect fabric. She would use the things she had on hand,” she said. “She would use 25 different colors – whatever felt right.”

Eventually, Alexander moved back to the Lower 48 and became best friends with Sylvia Dorney, owner of Greenbaum’s Quilted Forest in Salem.

Alexander started working in the shop and writing patterns that could be used by students. She and Dorney went on a buying trip to Atlantic City and met an acclaimed writer, Carol Doak, on the bus ride back to the airport.

Doak would later mentor Alexander on writing her first book, “Stack the Deck!: Crazy Quilts in 4 Easy Steps,” in 2002. Seven more books would follow.

Alexander’s writing would capture her quilting style – she does not like sewing strips repetitively. Instead, she “stacks the deck” with the same square, but a different color piece. The ultimate result is a quilt made of different color blocks and strips stacked on top of each other, Dorney said.

That modernist style would become a part of her teaching, which would encourage students to go beyond traditional design.

“People know I’m not going to judge them,” she said. “They can be a beginner and put stuff together in a different way or I will help them put it together the way they like to do it.”

Alexander will be making her seventh consecutive appearance at this year’s quilt show. She will have an exhibit of 20 quilts at McKenzie Creek Mercantile and will teach five different courses using quilts that she has made, she said.