Hi, I’m Marge Murphy and I have been quilting since the early 1970s, but have been a seamstress for years before that. I learned a great deal from my aunt, who was an experienced seamstress, who taught me a great deal when I was a child. I used that experience and built upon it. I was soon designing clothes, not just copying patterns. This led me to create original designs that were used in national-level fashion shows.
I received some old quilt tops made by my grandmother in the early 1970s and resolved to finish them. I knew a lot about sewing, but I am pretty much self-taught as far as quilting. I accomplished piecing easily, but had to learn about the actual mechanics of quilting, which is quite different from the simple sewing of seams. Running a needle through two pieces of fabric with a thick piece of batting while keeping small, perfect stitches was difficult. I knew there had to be better fillers than bulky, inconsistent cotton. There was: bonded, sheet polyester batting.
I finished those quilt tops, edged and quilted them and learned quite a bit. From there I made traditional quilts from scratch and then I began designing new quilts. I became interested in white quilting, which was using stitches to make a complex design on a quilt, which had little or no block work. This was highly demanding, because there was a need for bold, new designs and stitch consistency as the quilting design was the central theme, not color blocks.
By the mid 1970s I had a quilt shop in Biloxi and sold quilt supplies as well as taught quilting. Eventually, I began teaching farther afield in other cities and I also sold quilting kits and patters, which I designed. Eventually the pressures of designing, teaching, and selling quilt patters and accessories led me to close the shop by the late 1970s so I could concentrate more fully on my teaching, designing, and sales. By the late 70s I had a dozen patterns in production, and was selling both retail and wholesale. I was teaching throughout the U.S. and occasionally in Canada and the wholesale business really took off.
I branched out in designing show-quality clothing for major national-level fashion shows, but for fun, I taught myself lace making. Marge Murphy’s Heirloom Quilts was a great success and we sold wholesale to major chains and attended national shows. I did articles for magazines and kept on designing not just quilts, but clothing and accessories, all of which were made to use and utilized quilting as a major component.
From the beginning, I was entranced by Trapunto, a type of European stuffed quilting, which gave a raised texture when finished. The only problem was that traditionally, you had to slit the back of the quilt and stuff it only to sew it back up like a doctor doing an operation. The quilting was not organic, but an intrusion on the process and the finished product. The back of the quilt had ugly seams. I knew there had to be another way so I studied, thought and experimented for ways to stuff a Trapunto quilt and not have a scar on the back. Remember this was the time before computers and Google, so I had to order books, but mostly I just experimented on my own.
Eventually, I broke the code and figured out the secret of a fully reverseable Trapunto quilt which could be stuffed and yet show no ugly disfiguring cuts and stitching. The breakthrough was so new, that I eventually received a patent on the process. I couldn’t believe that not only was I published, but I had a patented as well for my process. Then I put a new spin on Trapunto: color that was inside the quilt.
My husband became increasingly ill and passed away in the late 1980s. During his illness the business was put on hold. Time passed and I found I wanted to revive Heirloom Quilts again. I had the stock on hand, I owned the copyrights and I had the expertise. Hurricane Katrina destroyed most of the stock I had on hand and set me back for a while, but I pressed on. I rebuilt my house and began again to start up Marge Murphy’s Heirloom quilts: I had lost a portion of the business, but the intellectual property and the drive was still mine. I persevered.
Jumping into the computer age a little late in my life, I am getting a web presence and beginning to sell via the internet. I embraced new business models of reduced stock levels and sharpened my focus to quilt patterns and retail sales. All of this leads us to this site and my revived line of Marge Murphy’s Heirloom Quilts. I am releasing not only my tried-and-true original patters, with updates, but I am also actively designing new patterns for release. With modern technology, I can design, scan, paste up and have patterns produced in a fraction of time it took decades ago. I have patterns for the advanced quilter as well as the beginner, which are not just quilt, but patterns for clothing and accessories. I’m sure you will be able to find a pattern that's perfect for your next project.
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