Beth Helfter began quilting in 1995 as a way to occupy herself while her husband completed his MBA. Her first project was a Christmas tree wallhanging, now considered too pitiful to hang on the wall at Christmas for any purpose other than to show how far she has come. Although she has enjoyed taking a few classes here and there, including from such reknowned artists as Carol Doak and Joan Shay, she is predominantly self-taught. Beth started playing around with her own design skills several years ago, and is now designing her own line of patterns, many of which include machine applique on pieced backgrounds, others which use up lots of scraps, all which are fun without being fussy. As a quilt designer and small business owner, she has found an outlet for her creative energies, a use for that minor in Business Administration she managed to complete in college, and a fantastic way to combine work and family while raising three small children.
Her work has appeared in Cotton Spice quilt magazine (Syncopated Ribbons, March 2007; Sunflower and Sky, September 2007) and has been juried into A Quilter’s Gathering and Southern New Hampshire Quilt Festival. She has been a member of Squanicook Colonial Quilt Guild since 1999, where her quilts have hung in their biannual shows and annual Pepperell library exhibitions. Beth has been teaching her original designs since 2005 to guilds and shops in New England and New York, and is very excited to now offer “Perfection is Overrated” to guilds in the same region.
She lives in Pepperell Massachusetts with her husband/business partner. They are the parents of three daughters; twins Eva and Paige, born in 2002, and Greta, "a tiny little division of EvaPaige", born August 2006.