Bio and Promotional Materials for Group Events

I’m so excited to be a part of your quiltmaking! Here are materials to help you promote this unique event.

Under 100 Words Bio:

Before Heidi Parkes was born in Chicago, IL in 1982, her grandmother organized a collaborative family quilt to commemorate her birth. Based in Milwaukee, Wisconsin since 2015, her quilting and mending celebrate the hand, and her works tug at memories, shared experience, materiality, and embodiment. Engaging in the worlds of art, quilts, mending, and social media, Heidi is an advocate for the domestic realms, slow stitching, and mindfulness. Find her on Instagram and YouTube. She was the 2024 Pfister Hotel Artist in Residence, and is a 2005 graduate from The School of the Art Institute of Chicago.

Short Bio:

Before Heidi Parkes was born in Chicago, IL in 1982, her grandmother organized a collaborative family quilt to commemorate her birth. Now based in Milwaukee, Wisconsin her quilting and mending celebrate the hand, and her works tug at memories and shared experience. Often using specific textiles, like an heirloom tablecloth, bed sheet, or cloth tea bag, Heidi adds subtle meaning and material memory from the start. Engaging in the worlds of art, quilts, mending, and social media, Heidi is an advocate for the domestic realms, slow stitching, and mindfulness. Find her on Instagram and YouTube. She was the 2024 Pfister Hotel Artist in Residence, and is a 2005 graduate from The School of the Art Institute of Chicago.

Longer Bio:

Before Heidi Parkes was born in Chicago, IL in 1982, her grandmother organized a collaborative family quilt to commemorate her birth. This set the tone for a life centered on the handmade- raised in a home where sewing, mending, cooking, canning, woodworking, photography, ceramics, painting, and plasterwork were the norm.

Now based in Milwaukee, her quilting and mending celebrate the hand, and her works tug at memories and shared experience. Often using specific textiles, like an heirloom tablecloth, bed sheet, or cloth teabag, Heidi adds subtle meaning and material memory from the start. Ever curious, she works with a variety of quilting techniques including visible hand piecing and knots, improvisation, patchwork, and applique. Heidi pursues her passion for teaching by lecturing and leading workshops, and shares her creative process with thousands on Instagram. Heidi has exhibited in art and textile museums across the country and was an Artist in Residence at Milwaukee’s Lake Park through the ARTservancy with Gallery 224 in fall 2020-21. She is the 2024 Pfister Hotel Artist in Residence. Additionally, Heidi lives a handmade lifestyle, sewing her own clothes, fermenting, eating from pottery she made a decade ago, and practicing hand yoga, which she shares with other creatives on her YouTube channel.

Alternate Bio:

Heidi Parkes received her Bachelor of Fine Arts with Emphasis in Education from SAIC in 2005 and continues pursuing her passion for teaching by lecturing and leading workshops nationally and internationally. She was the 2024 Pfister Artist in Residence in Milwaukee, WI. Parkes has won numerous awards at the Modern Quilt Guild’s QuiltCon, including notably best Hand Quilting in 2025, first place in Handwork in 2020 and 2016 and Judge’s Choice from Mondo Guerra in 2019, Alison Glass in in 2025, and Tammie Rubin in 2025. She taught at QuiltCon from 2017–2023 and has exhibited there 2016–2025. Two of Parkes’s Diary Quilts have toured with Quilt National in 2023 and 2025. She has exhibited her quilts at the San Jose Museum of Quilts and Textiles, the Iowa Quilt Museum, Pacific Northwest Quilt & Fiber Arts Museum, the Wisconsin Museum of Quilts & Fiber Arts, the New England Quilt Museum, The Dairy Barn, the Portrait Society Gallery, the James Watrous Gallery, Woman Made Gallery, the Milwaukee Institute of Art and Design, the Charles Allis Art Museum, the John Michael Kohler Arts Center, the South Bend Museum of Art, the Leigh Yawkey Woodson Art Museum, and internationally in Alsace, France, and Seoul, South Korea. Her work is in private collections throughout the U.S. and worldwide, and she connects with thousands on YouTube and Instagram.

Short Artist’s Statement:

My quilts are hand-stitched at nearly every phase with piecing, appliqué, embroidery, and quilting. I approach my compositions improvisationally, yielding to the circumstances of my daily life by sewing in meetings, on airplanes, and while on-the-go. This lighthearted approach admits to the ephemeral constraints of the everyday and yearns to create beauty with a process that mirrors and reveals the stresses of daily life. I use material meaning, diagrams, labor, repetition, and artifacts to invoke sympathetic magic and the law of attraction. Thus, I filter my wholehearted and tender desires through a lens of abstraction, maintaining my personal privacy while inviting viewers in with relatable and specific imagery. My quilt, Verdant, Aim, Nimble, Soften depicts the calendar for 2021, casting a spell to invite a similar abundant green energy into the future. My animal familiar, the rabbit, appears in many works as a self-portrait and stand-in for myself.

Longer Artist’s Statement:

I make quilts that function as abstract paintings, prioritizing hand-sewing techniques to explore the themes of diary, manifesting, everyday life, and cognitive reframing. My process begins with a question, and through the act of making, insights emerge. Improvisation and staying curious drive my work.

While I maintain a home studio, I also actively engage in a mobile studio. Lightheartedly tossing a bit of cloth, thimble, needle, thread, and scissors into my purse, I can nimbly find time to sew nearly anywhere, trusting that a future version of myself will incorporate the handwork meaningfully into my next quilt.

Intermingling intuition and strategy, my Diary Quilts don’t tell a linear story, but instead are a tool for reframing the past, envisioning the future, and documenting daily minutiae. They are inner dialogue made visible. Quilting is the microcosm in which I practice new ways of being—slowing down, cultivating new habits, reducing wastefulness—goals are set, and I stitch the things that I long for, want to be, and reminisce about. This strengthens my neural pathways for caring, noticing, and loving the hard-to-love. Owning up to the truth of what I want, I study and explore concepts like the Law of Attraction, sympathetic magic, and magical thinking to cast spells into the future. Artifacts, silhouettes, text, calendars, and coded objects add potency to this magic.

I believe that a window into the hyper personal and daring to dream big within a medium designed to express comfort and love offers the viewer a space to similarly contemplate and imagine. I create beauty with a portable process that mirrors and reveals the complexities of daily life. I remain curious about what a quilt can look like, what rules the maker must follow, and what power lays waiting in this soft medium.