About EPQD

Beth Helfter of EvaPaige Quilt Designs

Author, pattern designer, and national quilting instructor Beth Helfter has one rule about quilting - it's supposed to be fun. With that in mind, along with her company motto of "Inspired Designs, Relaxed Attitude," Beth brings visionary designs and techniques to her patterns and exuberance and encouragement to the classroom. Looking for staid or typical? You won't find it here.

As a mostly scrappy designer, Beth prefers to dig into her stash to create designs and patterns that appeal to her senses of color and value, using as many different fabrics as possible. Keeping to just a few color families in each quilt palette is one of her best tricks to keeping scrappy quilts from getting too out of hand but allowing them to sing with tone and movement. As a member of Quiltmaker Magazine's 2014 Scrap Squad, she recreated a design from each of six issues using only scraps, and was able to bring out different secondary designs and block highlights simply by adding more tone and value, as scrap quilts will do. Her lecture "Consistency in the Chaos" seeks to inspire quilters to think about scrap quilts and pull fabrics to make them shine without overwhelming the eye. Beth has decided she will never solve the mystery of why even scrap quilters can never use up their fabrics, and no longer even tries.

Her penchant for scraps and her need to use as many fabrics as possible in her quilts led her in 2017 to develop the Accordion Sewn HSTs™ method of creating half square triangles that don't have a match and yet waste no fabric. Delving into the method further, she discovered "ordering" the accordions could lead to the creation of whole blocks and quilts from a single accordion. Her first book on the method "Oompah! Jazz Up Your Scrap Quilts With Accordion Sewn HSTs™" was published in 2018, and "Another Round of Oompah" was published in 2020. It's been called "life-changing," "magical," "addictive," and, her favorite, "witchcraft," and is the basis for many of her most popular lectures and workshops as well as the inspiration for most of her newer designs. So far no polka dancing has broken out in these workshops, but she keeps hoping.

Since founding EvaPaige Quilt Designs in 2005, she has published a vast range of scrappy patterns and her work has been featured in various quilting magazines and on well known quilting websites. As a traveling quilt teacher, she's visited guilds coast to coast and taught at national and regional quilt shows, and never tires of the ah-ha moments and banter of a classroom full of quilters.

Beth resides in Pepperell MA with her cute but calendar-obsessed husband, three delightful but dramatic teenage and almost adult daughters, and a psychotic but adorable cat.