If Linda Crandall needs to take a break while she’s quilting, she doesn’t have to look far. Her Hungry Horse home looks down directly at the Flathead River, which slides past her backyard as birds flit amongst the trees from feeder to feeder.

Crandall, who is the featured quilter in this year’s Teakettle Quilter Guild show, started quilting about 25 years ago when she first moved to the Flathead to be closer to her family. Her son, Jon, a retired Army veteran and West Point graduate, lives up the road in Coram.

After he retired from the military he moved to the Flathead and Linda and her husband, Jack, followed suit just a few weeks later after living in Colorado for years.

They’ve been along the river ever since. Crandall’s studio, which includes two sewing machines, takes up a good third of the couple’s lower floor of their house.

She said got serious about quilting while living here, taking classes along the way to hone her craft, including from local master Selena Beckwith.

“She was such a good teacher,” she said.

She said over the years she’s given most of her quilts away, primarily to family and friends, but also to the community through the guild, which makes quilts for the Montana Veterans Home residents as well as others who might need a good, hand-crafted blanket. 

She also used to help with teaching Columbia Falls students how to quilt, but the sewing classes are no longer offered as part of the school’s curriculum.

There’s an order of operation when building a quilt, she noted, typically starting with the squares of materials, which are sewn together, eventually forming the end product.

“You have to follow the pattern, or you get in trouble,” she said.

Once the squares are sewn together, batting is inserted, typically cotton or wool, and then the final “quilting” is done, typically with a long-armed sewing machine.

Crandall doesn’t have one of her own, but she has plenty of friends that do.

She’s done hundreds of pieces over the years and she enjoys earth tones and rich, but natural colors in her pieces.

“But I also have a quilt that’s aqua,” she said.

Every once in awhile Jack will chime in on her work. She had a gorgeous quilt hanging on the stair rail and he looked at it.

“You have a mistake in there,” he said.

Sure enough, she did. A block was off.

But like many handcrafted items, one would be hard pressed to find it.

Her advice to beginning quilters?

“Take classes to begin with,” she said. You’re always learning, 20-plus years later. The Teakettle Quilt Guild show is from 9 a.m. to 3:45 p.m. at Glacier Gateway Elementary School on Fourth Avenue West in Columbia Falls. The big show features hundreds of locally crafted quilts as long as other vendors, vintage sewing machines and a quilt will be raffled off. Admission is free, but a donation to the Columbia Falls Food Bank is appreciated.