Sew Fun: She has a passion for quilts

There’s a lot of people who quilt in the Flathead Valley. But very few build an addition onto their house to serve their hobby.

But then again, a lot of people aren’t as avid quilters as Peggy Aagenes-Janzer is.

Aagenes-Janzer of Kalispell is this year’s Teakettle Quilt Guild featured quilter. She’s been sewing since she was a child growing up in Billings.

Her mother taught her how to sew her own clothes, partly out of necessity.

“We didn’t have the money to buy them,” she said during an interview at her home last week.

The sewing led to quilting, a hobby she’s enjoyed for decades.

“Every quilt has a story,” she said. “I don’t care who’s done it.”

Aagenes-Janzer worked for 30 years in advertising sales at the Daily Inter Lake.

“When I retired I wanted to sew until I couldn’t do it anymore,” she said. “I haven’t found anything else better.”

Creating a quilt is no small task. She can easily have two, three days into a single quilt, many of which have intricately sewn patterns. The fabric is expensive and coupled with the time it takes to create one, a quilter can easily have $400 to $500 invested into a bed-sized quilt when all is said and done.

So to help finance her habit, she bought a quilting machine. It used to be in the garage, but it would get too cold out there, so she and her husband, Red, built an addition onto her house. The addition is big — 16 by 24 feet. But then again, so is the quilting machine, a Gammill Statler Stitcher. It’s 14-feet long and made of steel. It took six grown men just to get it up the stairs into the room.

Today, Aagenes-Janzer does quilting for quilters all over the country. They send her the quilts in boxes and the machine lays down the actual quilting, which is the intricate stitching that holds the piece together.

On this day, she’s quilting a king-sized quilt done by Willow J. Lyman of Washington state.

The additional income quilting other quilters pieces “supports my habit.”

Like many quilters, she not only has her own room, her guest room is also loaded with gorgeous quilts.

She sells a few of her own pieces, but mostly gives them away to friends and family.

“My family gets tired of getting quilts,” she said.

At the Teakettle Quilt Guild show in Columbia Falls in April, she’ll have several of her quilts on display and will also offer a free drawing for a quilting at no charge.

Her advice to young quilters?

“Just keep doing it,” she said. “It’s so much fun.”

The annual Teakettle Quilters Guild show is from 9 a.m. to 4 p.m. at Glacier Gateway Elementary School in Columbia Falls on April 8.